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Bait click heading. Nationwide, the estimated average public-school teacher’s salary is now $58,950. Not a bad salary I would say, and the salary is 20% lower

Bait click heading. Nationwide, the estimated average public-school teacher’s salary is now $58,950. Not a bad salary I would say, and the salary is 20% lower than similar college degree which is not to bad considering one have more time off than other jobs (summer vacation etc). Would be more interesting if there was a lack of people wanting to work as teachers but the article didn't say anything about that.

gadders 8y ago
If you assume they work only 8 months of the year due to holidays, pro-rata that would be $88,425.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dagw 8y ago
  If you assume they work only 8 month of the year, then you probably don't know too many teachers.
  - gadders 8y ago
    What do they do in the 3-4 months off each year? They're not attending their schools.
    - keithpeter 8y ago
      They work at home on non-contact tasks including planning coherent sequences of lessons, and 'differentiating' the approach within each lesson for lower quartile, median and upper quartile students. There may also be discrete special learning needs (e.g a deaf student who communicates exclusively by sign language and who will have an interpreter and a note taker present, a student with Asperger's, a student with type 1 diabetes and significant eyesight impairment, a student with pronounced dyslexia). Within the planning process, you often have to allow for significant changes in the syllabus content and mode of assessment. There is usually staff training provided by school management, and career progression in teaching is linked to taking on extra responsibility. Now, a very interesting question is why do we have the long summer holidays still? Lets face it, a very small proportion of the population work on farms these days. Changing that would have to be a big bang change of course. The whole system would need to move over to a new school year in one go, which is probably why no government has done it yet. I'm also, looking back on a 30 year career, beginning to wonder if a more 'industrial' approach to curriculum design might be useful. Why not simply devise a national curriculum and produce standardised lesson plans and schemes to go with it? In the UK we have the national curriculum bit but teachers are still scrabbling around for resources and activities.
      - Yoric 8y ago
        > I'm also, looking back on a 30 year career, beginning to wonder if a more 'industrial' approach to curriculum design might be useful. Why not simply devise a national curriculum and produce standardised lesson plans and schemes to go with it? That's what we do in France. In most cases, it works rather well. The main problem is that it means that every change has to be synchronized nation-wide, which is time and resource consuming. Also, since it's national, it can quickly become a national cause, both for the government (who sometimes decide to change the curriculum for purely political reasons) and for some parts the opposition (« No, that's not how you do Sex Ed! », or such). Also, we're not too good at handling edge cases (e.g. students with special needs, gifted students, students in places where most parents don't speak French).
        keithpeter 8y ago
        Interesting, I'm wondering if the standardised lesson plans and schemes are available on a Web site somewhere, and so I'm googling with my schoolboy French right now. Are your teachers noticeably less busy by the way?
    - mtberatwork 8y ago
      No teacher in the US is off for 3-4 months (summer break in the US is only ~10 weeks to begin with). During summer breaks teachers take classes, renew certifications, prepare lesson plans, tutor, return early to setup classrooms and otherwise prep for the upcoming school year. During the school year, teachers work before and after the students arrive, meet with parents/school officials and get things ready for the day. They also as work weekends grading papers/projects/etc and otherwise organize the upcoming week ahead. Hours can be long and arduous during the year and the amount of actual vacation time available to be off is equivalent to a typical office worker (3-4 weeks at best). Source: in-laws/wife are all teachers.
      - gadders 8y ago
        As I understand it from teachers, creating lesson plans is something you typically do infrequently - certainly less than yearly. Absent major curriculum changes you can re-use your lesson plans for years. The coming in early and working late, as well as the occasional weekend is something that a lot of other professional jobs do as well, without a ten week summer break.
        mtberatwork 8y ago
        > As I understand it from teachers, creating lesson plans is something you typically do infrequently - certainly less than yearly. Absent major curriculum changes you can re-use your lesson plans for years. Lesson plans change frequently and aside from some macro-level planning, re-use is quite difficult from year-to-year. Some children also have individualized lesson plans that require more attention. > The coming in early and working late, as well as the occasional weekend is something that a lot of other professional jobs do as well, without a ten week summer break. Again, they are not off the entire ten weeks. They have work obligations to fulfill during the summer. Furthermore, during the school year, teachers work just about every weekend and not 'the occasional weekend'.
        rhexs 8y ago
        Useless anecdote incoming, but after always reading the many hastily posted defenses posted after anyone claims that teachers get to take summer off, I asked a friend who started teaching a few years ago. He said that you do indeed get most of the summer off. Few conferences you might have to attend, some teachers take second jobs, etc. Granted, he's a really smart guy and probably has less difficulty than others making lesson plans, but seems like a good gig if you have decent time management skills and enjoy the privilege of teaching the next generation. I'm sure it depends heavily on the district, but the "teachers are the hardest workers!" tagline always seemed like an easy story to tell to (justifiably) ask for wage increases. "gasp They have to grade homework at home!". Well, yeah, I have to take office work home as well as the United States has no labor laws preventing that.
  - kennethh 8y ago
    The work for an math or physical education teacher is a lot less than for an English teacher. Grading long essays take a lot of time. Grammar School is also less time demanding than high school for time used to prepare and grading papers.
    - keithpeter 8y ago
      Can't speak for physical education, but I've taught basic maths to adults for a long time, and I work with English teachers and ESOL teachers. A key concept in teaching is what we call 'differentiation', the idea that different students will need a different approach. A good model for HN people here would be (say) a computer game. If a game is too easy, you get bored. If the game is impossibly challenging, you give up. A well designed game that develops you has to be pitched at the right level for you. Individually. English differentiates by student response to a common task. Maths differentiates by topic. So, the English teacher can (for example) set a title for a piece of writing and the whole class can work on that for say half an hour, and each person can feel that they have done their best. The teacher has to mark the pieces and that is where the differentiation comes in: one student might have shown really good progress by producing sentences organised into paragraphs, another student might have explored a metaphor and developed a simile, but might have been 'phoning it in' compared to their previous performance. Marking a class set of work and providing feedback to each student is where the time goes. In my maths class, some students just need different work to other students. Some students will finish a lot quicker than other students. So my work is more on identifying and producing resources, skill development exercises and enrichment activities than the marking. Mind you, the marking still takes time. As a concrete example, how long do you think it would take to mark a worksheet like [1]? [1] http://www.maths91.uk/files/week10-algebra02.pdf http://www.maths91.uk/files/week10-algebra02.pdf
consp 8y ago
The summer-off argument has been used in many countries and since I know some teachers now it is a pretty shitty argument as most of the 'summer vacation' is filled with learning (required), creating next years curriculum due to changes in the requirements and helping the less-well-off children get through. On average they do get a bit more off-time in the summer, but also work considerable longer hours per day and nights (speaking to parents, yay!) than most office workers.
tallanvor 8y ago
Non-teachers seem to greatly underestimate the time spent by teachers. Growing up, my mother and two of my aunts were teachers. My brother is a teacher now. They routinely spend upwards of 80 hours a week teaching, grading papers, preparing lesson plans, and contacting parents. They also have to spend time before and after school and at lunch monitoring students (making sure they don't run into the road, keep arguments from breaking out into fights, etc.) Teaching is not a 9 to 5 job with 12 weeks of vacation a year. The median salary in San Francisco is about $70k per year. How many developers would accept that as a salary in SF these days? Yet you would still claim that teachers get paid well.
- barrow-rider 8y ago
  How many would accept median pay anywhere? 70k in the Research Triangle in NC is probably unimpressive. $70k in the DC area is piddly, and good devs and IT folks, esp. those with clearances and decent chops, are making easily $120k+. I'd image the same holds true for NYC and Boston.
  - hammock 8y ago
    >How many would accept median pay anywhere? (Runs a few calculations on a napkin ...) Exactly half.
keithpeter 8y ago
Quotes from OA "...shortening school weeks and enacting emergency certification for people who aren’t trained as educators." and "This year in Oklahoma, a record number of teachers were given emergency teaching certifications, despite no traditional training." and "The pipeline, meanwhile, is drying up. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of new educators completing preparatory programs fell by 23%, according to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. And once teachers make it to the classroom, attrition is high: at least 17% leave the profession within the first five years, a 2015 study found." UK metrics: the government tends to plan on a 9% per year replacement rate for most public sector jobs. We have around half a million teachers in England and Wales, so that is 45,000 extra newly qualified teachers each year. Not sure what the numbers are like in the various states in the US. Remember that employing a cohort of teachers with a lower qualification level is going to give you a support and in-service training need that lasts for 20, 25 years or so. Mind you, 17% leaving in first five years is actually pretty good. Much higher in UK. Could be the fact that the occupation is more accessible to people with children keeping people in as alluded to early in the article. Time off: the summer holiday isn't pure holiday as such, and a lot of what you do as a teacher happens outside the classroom. Being able to decide when I do the extra work is nice, but the work still has to get done.
ForHackernews 8y ago
$59,000 is only a good salary in comparison to how terribly most jobs pay in America. Many junior devs fresh out of college make more than that, and I sure as heck would not trust my junior devs with the responsibility for my children. I know a bunch of people will jump in here and lecture about supply and demand, but the fact is the American economy is weirdly bimodal where essential services (public education, bridge repair, public transit) are cut to the bone, while you pay an exorbitant fortune to people doing nonsense jobs targeting ads or moving numbers around in Excel.
jeoeow828 8y ago
You’re using one normalized stat to come to a conclusion of “not bad”? Many teachers get $0 or a pittance for supplies and have to spend from their own salary so other people’s kids to have access to learning activities and materials. They’re spending their days dealing with a room full of emotionally selfish brats. You think they grade all that homework from 8-3? Nope. Many spend dozens of hours working outside the classroom. Meanwhile, I’ve worked with dozens of coders who contribute jack squat, but earn &100k+. Coders who often could be replaced with a few git clone ops and a Squarespace front end if companies weren’t obsessed with re-inventing the wheel, or over fetishing their web ui which really just follows one of 6 common looks. Quite simply our economics around who gets paid are effed. There are few tech folks that couldn’t be replaced by thousands of other workers who are just as capable at churning out CRUD app after CRUD app Smart and capable people that might be interested in teaching the next generation if the pay didn’t suck given the expectations put on them
- phil21 8y ago
  > have to spend from their own salary so other people’s kids to have access to learning activities and materials. I can not describe in words how much I hate this utter false narrative. Stop giving money for this bullshit and it instantly stops within 24 months. Period. It only continues because of wording like "have to" in these sort of posts. No, they don't have no. If they didn't, schools would pick up the insanely trivial cost of these items. This is not a source of school funding issues. 99% of parents can figure out where to get an extra $50 over the course of a school year if they care even a tiny little bit. The 80/20 rule you describe holds true almost everywhere in life. 20% of the people on the planet do 80% of the work, that's how it always has been and always will be. Unfortunately compensation will never properly align. > Smart and capable people that might be interested in teaching the next generation if the pay didn’t suc This has almost nothing to do with the pay, and everything to do with how shitty the job is. I'd educate smart motivated kids with parents who would kick their ass at home for a very marginal salary - it's fulfilling and interesting. Public school in the US as it's practiced today? I'm not sure you could offer me enough money to do such a thing. I'd rather retire today than take such a job at 4x my current pay. Perhaps solve that last paragraph of mine and we could actually fix education in this country. Edit: tldr; we agree for the most part but I'm much more militant in nature :)

gadders 8y ago

If you assume they work only 8 months of the year due to holidays, pro-rata that would be $88,425.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dagw 8y ago
If you assume they work only 8 month of the year, then you probably don't know too many teachers.
- gadders 8y ago
  What do they do in the 3-4 months off each year? They're not attending their schools.
  - keithpeter 8y ago
    They work at home on non-contact tasks including planning coherent sequences of lessons, and 'differentiating' the approach within each lesson for lower quartile, median and upper quartile students. There may also be discrete special learning needs (e.g a deaf student who communicates exclusively by sign language and who will have an interpreter and a note taker present, a student with Asperger's, a student with type 1 diabetes and significant eyesight impairment, a student with pronounced dyslexia). Within the planning process, you often have to allow for significant changes in the syllabus content and mode of assessment. There is usually staff training provided by school management, and career progression in teaching is linked to taking on extra responsibility. Now, a very interesting question is why do we have the long summer holidays still? Lets face it, a very small proportion of the population work on farms these days. Changing that would have to be a big bang change of course. The whole system would need to move over to a new school year in one go, which is probably why no government has done it yet. I'm also, looking back on a 30 year career, beginning to wonder if a more 'industrial' approach to curriculum design might be useful. Why not simply devise a national curriculum and produce standardised lesson plans and schemes to go with it? In the UK we have the national curriculum bit but teachers are still scrabbling around for resources and activities.
    - Yoric 8y ago
      > I'm also, looking back on a 30 year career, beginning to wonder if a more 'industrial' approach to curriculum design might be useful. Why not simply devise a national curriculum and produce standardised lesson plans and schemes to go with it? That's what we do in France. In most cases, it works rather well. The main problem is that it means that every change has to be synchronized nation-wide, which is time and resource consuming. Also, since it's national, it can quickly become a national cause, both for the government (who sometimes decide to change the curriculum for purely political reasons) and for some parts the opposition (« No, that's not how you do Sex Ed! », or such). Also, we're not too good at handling edge cases (e.g. students with special needs, gifted students, students in places where most parents don't speak French).
      - keithpeter 8y ago
        Interesting, I'm wondering if the standardised lesson plans and schemes are available on a Web site somewhere, and so I'm googling with my schoolboy French right now. Are your teachers noticeably less busy by the way?
  - mtberatwork 8y ago
    No teacher in the US is off for 3-4 months (summer break in the US is only ~10 weeks to begin with). During summer breaks teachers take classes, renew certifications, prepare lesson plans, tutor, return early to setup classrooms and otherwise prep for the upcoming school year. During the school year, teachers work before and after the students arrive, meet with parents/school officials and get things ready for the day. They also as work weekends grading papers/projects/etc and otherwise organize the upcoming week ahead. Hours can be long and arduous during the year and the amount of actual vacation time available to be off is equivalent to a typical office worker (3-4 weeks at best). Source: in-laws/wife are all teachers.
    - gadders 8y ago
      As I understand it from teachers, creating lesson plans is something you typically do infrequently - certainly less than yearly. Absent major curriculum changes you can re-use your lesson plans for years. The coming in early and working late, as well as the occasional weekend is something that a lot of other professional jobs do as well, without a ten week summer break.
      - mtberatwork 8y ago
        > As I understand it from teachers, creating lesson plans is something you typically do infrequently - certainly less than yearly. Absent major curriculum changes you can re-use your lesson plans for years. Lesson plans change frequently and aside from some macro-level planning, re-use is quite difficult from year-to-year. Some children also have individualized lesson plans that require more attention. > The coming in early and working late, as well as the occasional weekend is something that a lot of other professional jobs do as well, without a ten week summer break. Again, they are not off the entire ten weeks. They have work obligations to fulfill during the summer. Furthermore, during the school year, teachers work just about every weekend and not 'the occasional weekend'.
      - rhexs 8y ago
        Useless anecdote incoming, but after always reading the many hastily posted defenses posted after anyone claims that teachers get to take summer off, I asked a friend who started teaching a few years ago. He said that you do indeed get most of the summer off. Few conferences you might have to attend, some teachers take second jobs, etc. Granted, he's a really smart guy and probably has less difficulty than others making lesson plans, but seems like a good gig if you have decent time management skills and enjoy the privilege of teaching the next generation. I'm sure it depends heavily on the district, but the "teachers are the hardest workers!" tagline always seemed like an easy story to tell to (justifiably) ask for wage increases. "gasp They have to grade homework at home!". Well, yeah, I have to take office work home as well as the United States has no labor laws preventing that.
- kennethh 8y ago
  The work for an math or physical education teacher is a lot less than for an English teacher. Grading long essays take a lot of time. Grammar School is also less time demanding than high school for time used to prepare and grading papers.
  - keithpeter 8y ago
    Can't speak for physical education, but I've taught basic maths to adults for a long time, and I work with English teachers and ESOL teachers. A key concept in teaching is what we call 'differentiation', the idea that different students will need a different approach. A good model for HN people here would be (say) a computer game. If a game is too easy, you get bored. If the game is impossibly challenging, you give up. A well designed game that develops you has to be pitched at the right level for you. Individually. English differentiates by student response to a common task. Maths differentiates by topic. So, the English teacher can (for example) set a title for a piece of writing and the whole class can work on that for say half an hour, and each person can feel that they have done their best. The teacher has to mark the pieces and that is where the differentiation comes in: one student might have shown really good progress by producing sentences organised into paragraphs, another student might have explored a metaphor and developed a simile, but might have been 'phoning it in' compared to their previous performance. Marking a class set of work and providing feedback to each student is where the time goes. In my maths class, some students just need different work to other students. Some students will finish a lot quicker than other students. So my work is more on identifying and producing resources, skill development exercises and enrichment activities than the marking. Mind you, the marking still takes time. As a concrete example, how long do you think it would take to mark a worksheet like [1]? [1] http://www.maths91.uk/files/week10-algebra02.pdf http://www.maths91.uk/files/week10-algebra02.pdf

consp 8y ago

The summer-off argument has been used in many countries and since I know some teachers now it is a pretty shitty argument as most of the 'summer vacation' is filled with learning (required), creating next years curriculum due to changes in the requirements and helping the less-well-off children get through. On average they do get a bit more off-time in the summer, but also work considerable longer hours per day and nights (speaking to parents, yay!) than most office workers.

tallanvor 8y ago

Non-teachers seem to greatly underestimate the time spent by teachers. Growing up, my mother and two of my aunts were teachers. My brother is a teacher now. They routinely spend upwards of 80 hours a week teaching, grading papers, preparing lesson plans, and contacting parents. They also have to spend time before and after school and at lunch monitoring students (making sure they don't run into the road, keep arguments from breaking out into fights, etc.) Teaching is not a 9 to 5 job with 12 weeks of vacation a year. The median salary in San Francisco is about $70k per year. How many developers would accept that as a salary in SF these days? Yet you would still claim that teachers get paid well.

barrow-rider 8y ago
How many would accept median pay anywhere? 70k in the Research Triangle in NC is probably unimpressive. $70k in the DC area is piddly, and good devs and IT folks, esp. those with clearances and decent chops, are making easily $120k+. I'd image the same holds true for NYC and Boston.
- hammock 8y ago
  >How many would accept median pay anywhere? (Runs a few calculations on a napkin ...) Exactly half.

keithpeter 8y ago

Quotes from OA "...shortening school weeks and enacting emergency certification for people who aren’t trained as educators." and "This year in Oklahoma, a record number of teachers were given emergency teaching certifications, despite no traditional training." and "The pipeline, meanwhile, is drying up. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of new educators completing preparatory programs fell by 23%, according to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. And once teachers make it to the classroom, attrition is high: at least 17% leave the profession within the first five years, a 2015 study found." UK metrics: the government tends to plan on a 9% per year replacement rate for most public sector jobs. We have around half a million teachers in England and Wales, so that is 45,000 extra newly qualified teachers each year. Not sure what the numbers are like in the various states in the US. Remember that employing a cohort of teachers with a lower qualification level is going to give you a support and in-service training need that lasts for 20, 25 years or so. Mind you, 17% leaving in first five years is actually pretty good. Much higher in UK. Could be the fact that the occupation is more accessible to people with children keeping people in as alluded to early in the article. Time off: the summer holiday isn't pure holiday as such, and a lot of what you do as a teacher happens outside the classroom. Being able to decide when I do the extra work is nice, but the work still has to get done.

ForHackernews 8y ago

$59,000 is only a good salary in comparison to how terribly most jobs pay in America. Many junior devs fresh out of college make more than that, and I sure as heck would not trust my junior devs with the responsibility for my children. I know a bunch of people will jump in here and lecture about supply and demand, but the fact is the American economy is weirdly bimodal where essential services (public education, bridge repair, public transit) are cut to the bone, while you pay an exorbitant fortune to people doing nonsense jobs targeting ads or moving numbers around in Excel.

jeoeow828 8y ago

You’re using one normalized stat to come to a conclusion of “not bad”? Many teachers get $0 or a pittance for supplies and have to spend from their own salary so other people’s kids to have access to learning activities and materials. They’re spending their days dealing with a room full of emotionally selfish brats. You think they grade all that homework from 8-3? Nope. Many spend dozens of hours working outside the classroom. Meanwhile, I’ve worked with dozens of coders who contribute jack squat, but earn &100k+. Coders who often could be replaced with a few git clone ops and a Squarespace front end if companies weren’t obsessed with re-inventing the wheel, or over fetishing their web ui which really just follows one of 6 common looks. Quite simply our economics around who gets paid are effed. There are few tech folks that couldn’t be replaced by thousands of other workers who are just as capable at churning out CRUD app after CRUD app Smart and capable people that might be interested in teaching the next generation if the pay didn’t suck given the expectations put on them

phil21 8y ago
> have to spend from their own salary so other people’s kids to have access to learning activities and materials. I can not describe in words how much I hate this utter false narrative. Stop giving money for this bullshit and it instantly stops within 24 months. Period. It only continues because of wording like "have to" in these sort of posts. No, they don't have no. If they didn't, schools would pick up the insanely trivial cost of these items. This is not a source of school funding issues. 99% of parents can figure out where to get an extra $50 over the course of a school year if they care even a tiny little bit. The 80/20 rule you describe holds true almost everywhere in life. 20% of the people on the planet do 80% of the work, that's how it always has been and always will be. Unfortunately compensation will never properly align. > Smart and capable people that might be interested in teaching the next generation if the pay didn’t suc This has almost nothing to do with the pay, and everything to do with how shitty the job is. I'd educate smart motivated kids with parents who would kick their ass at home for a very marginal salary - it's fulfilling and interesting. Public school in the US as it's practiced today? I'm not sure you could offer me enough money to do such a thing. I'd rather retire today than take such a job at 4x my current pay. Perhaps solve that last paragraph of mine and we could actually fix education in this country. Edit: tldr; we agree for the most part but I'm much more militant in nature :)