29 ms·

The myth of the teacher pay gap?

144 points by autokill 7y ago

planetzero 7y ago
One of my relatives retired from teaching a couple of years ago. She had guaranteed raises every year and ended up making close to $100,000/year.
- WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
  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.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    On the east and west coast, I've met quite a few teachers, and none have a 3 month break every year. Maybe a few weeks, but they are frequently tasked with continuing education or some other task during the summers. And during the year, they're always working 12+ hour days.
    - negzero7 7y ago
      I think the "always working 12+ hour days" thing is a myth. My wife is a teacher and I would say her and the teachers she works with will occasionally work extra hours, but by far it's mostly 7.5 hour days (8:30am - 4pm).
      - jedberg 7y ago
        I think that's the difference between a good teacher and an average one. My wife was a teacher (left because of the poor salary). She worked 12+ hours a day five days a week (we made sure to keep weekends open but we were there on weekends too sometimes). You could see which other teachers were there 12+ hours. It was the ones that sent the most prepared kids to her class. There was an obvious quality difference between the kids who had teachers that worked 12+ hours a day and those that didn't.
      - shantly 7y ago
        Depends on the grade and subject. Some teachers have a whole lot more grading to do than others. And some grading or planning is slower-going than others. Also some schools are better about keeping time clear during the day for teachers to plan & grade than others.
    - WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
      New teachers are the ones that get the 12hr days. I knew a teacher that told me the early days were hard since he had to develop the lessons and there was a learning curve too but at some point, his days got shorter and it got more enjoyable.
  - igetspam 7y ago
    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.
    - H1Supreme 7y ago
      > The three month break is a myth. 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).
    - WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
      > $40-50k is not enough money to live on, in most places. But it's not just the pay. They get very nice benefits too. Yes, it's not a luxurious job but it's a good middle-class job. All workers cry poverty when it comes to pay but for the most part U.S. teachers don't fall in that track.
  - negzero7 7y ago
    Along with the other commenters, the 3 month break isn't accurate. It tends to work out closer to about 7 weeks off. I do agree that I also could never do their job! (Source: My wife is a teacher)
    - WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
      >7 weeks off not 12 weeks but 7 is still nice...
- 3JPLW 7y ago
  Good for her! Unfortunately, your anecdote is not representative. Many older teachers are getting forced out because, well, they're expensive and new teachers are underpaid. https://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/ https://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    > Unfortunately, your anecdote is not representative. Of teachers starting today? Probably not. Older government employees often had ludicrously lucrative compensation packages compared to what we have now. It may or may not depending on what group we're talking about. > Many older teachers are getting forced out because, well, they're expensive Do you have information for that one, the link provided just lists starting and average salaries.
    - eesmith 7y ago
      What you describe as "ludicrously lucrative", I prefer to describe as "reasonable". I mean, couldn't I equally well say that the compensation packages we have now are ludicrously miserly?
  - julianapostate 7y ago
    fyi for anyone curious on that source.. those numbers come from america's largest labor union and professional interest group for public school teachers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Association
- iamalexm 7y ago
  Still low for required education. Also, the raises haven't matched inflation; but that's a larger problem across all jobs.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    The required education doesn’t help the students so why reward it? Education degrees and continuing professional education have no reliably detectable effect on teacher effectiveness. Experience does, up to six years, and subject matter expertise does, so teachers with a Master’s in Chemistry get better results than ones with just a Bachelor’s but the qualifications most people are talking about are in pedagogy, which has no effect. And it’s not like it’s a secret that the average Ed school degree is a joke, even if you don’t count the bloated Master’s degree that is an Ed.D.
marricks 7y ago
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 wage, my points still stand about houses or college, and it’s not like her wages will go up much.
- shantly 7y ago
  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. That wasn't so bad before we had kids, but it's really shitty now. Lots of her co-workers work second jobs to make ends meet. Luckily for us I make a whole lot more than she does, which is dumb because she both does way more good than me and works much harder.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    The teachers union in my city basically negotiated a deal for higher pay but the union would self fund their health benefits. It turned out to be a bad deal because over the years health care costs skyrocketed compared to the pay increases. What amazed me is some teachers are mentioning premiums higher than the individual market rates. So apparently they can't even negotiate good group premiums.
    - shantly 7y ago
      School district controls ours but this year they were all "the bad news is ya'll got sick too much so the rates are going up and deductible's worse, the good news is it's only going up 10% this year and, oh, probably forever into the future every year, and no we didn't get a second quote, the insurers told us they didn't even make any money on us last year." There's a shocking amount of incompetence and corruption in school admin. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which.
vkhn 7y ago
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 average 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals". My wife is a teacher, and I can tell you exactly why. Also, I laughed particularly hard at "teaching jobs are not particularly stressful or unpleasant compared to other occupations" Hilarious.
- H1Supreme 7y ago
  > My wife is a teacher, and I can tell you exactly why. Which is?
  - karl11 7y ago
    They do a ton of work at home outside of school hours.
    - ydnaclementine 7y ago
      But according to this study, they aren’t and are only working ~40 hours. So who’s misunderstanding, this study that used time diaries from teachers or what the other teachers say? Both sources are self reported. I was expecting this study to ignore the extra hours that teachers put in away from the kids, but they seem to account for that.
      - Florin_Andrei 7y ago
        The "article" was produced by a neocon think tank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute It's a "study" in the sense that a blog by the American Tobacco Association (fictional entity invented for the purpose of this argument) produces "studies" about the "harmlessness of tobacco smoking".
Someone1234 7y ago
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 related). Personally I think someone required to have a degree (master's for quoted salary), continued education requirements, and licensing earning under $50K/year starting is too low. Plus no teacher is working 8-3, you'd have no opportunity for lesson planning, grading, and all those extra curriculars they are essentially guilted into organizing. The fact that I could walk out of college with zero experience and only a degree, and earn $20K more than that working only 9-5 in the same city seems unfair (as a programmer). But I have no idea how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective. But it is great that at the end of a long career a few unicorn teachers can earn $100K, a salary I earned within 5 years and still no master's or licencing.
- SamuelAdams 7y ago
  > required to have a masters degree This isn't true from my experience. I have several friends who teach K-12 education. They only have a bachelor's degree, many times in different areas than what they are teaching (English degree teaching Math, for example).
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    I updated the wording a little to be clearer. I was trying to say, to earn $50K starting salary quoted as a teacher you were required to have a master's degree ($43K otherwise ($45K otherwise)).
  - noer 7y ago
    It varies state to state. Some states require you to have a masters degree, some require you to have a masters degree or being the process of obtaining one, some states require you to have a masters but will waive that requirement if there's a need and some states require only a bachelors degree. Edit: there is a list of state requirements here: https://www.asha.org/Advocacy/state/StateTeacherCredentialingRequirements/ https://www.asha.org/Advocacy/state/StateTeacherCredentialin...
SamuelAdams 7y ago
Why not just go directly to the source? https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#25-0000 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 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. But I wonder how many teachers are new versus how many stay in the field a long time? I also wonder how location-dependent these salaries are.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  I think it's more useful to look at new teacher salaries by state to get around tenure and averaging effects [1]. Fine vs. not fine varies a lot by location in this list. [1] http://www.nea.org/home/2017-2018-average-starting-teacher-salary.html http://www.nea.org/home/2017-2018-average-starting-teacher-s...
  - hunterloftis 7y ago
    For others who might be interested, the lowest starting salary listed is Montanta ($31,418), highest is DC ($55,209). Scaled up from 10 months to 12 months of work, that's $37,702 and $66,251, respectively. The median household income is $53,386 in Montana and $82,372 in DC [1][2]. In both cases, even the un-scaled teacher's salary easily accounts for half of a typical household's income. So even without tenure and averaging effects, this data backs up the article's claims. 1. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/washington-dc/ https://datausa.io/profile/geo/washington-dc/ 2. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/montana https://datausa.io/profile/geo/montana
- deleted 7y ago
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- humanrebar 7y ago
  It didn't feel good as a teenager to hear teachers complain about education levels, workload, and salary when my intelligent and hard-working parents made less, worked as much, and had much less employment certainty.
jedberg 7y ago
You'll notice a lot of people commenting here "my wife is a teacher" (myself included). I think these statistics are missing two very big factors. - In high cost areas like the Silicon Valley, almost every teacher is married to an engineer or is the child of an engineer. That is why they don't need a second job. Because they have a support network. - Teacher quits are low because most of the people who would be great teachers simply never get into the job because of the crappy pay and work conditions. The people who are the best at it could easily get other jobs. My wife if a great example -- during the summer she worked a temp job in the first few years that was basically a management job that would have an annual salary in the six figure range. She only kept doing teaching because she loved it and because I made enough money to support us.
- Florin_Andrei 7y ago
  > That is why they don't need a second job. Because they have a support network. If an alien visitor to Earth was looking at this sorry situation, they could make some interesting assumptions about the priorities of this society and culture, as a whole, with regards to education.
- prepend 7y ago
  There’s actual data on both points you make. These anecdotes and conjectures are not very valuable. There are high quit rates in other industries that would have the same loss of potentially awesome staff as well. Why do teachers quit so infrequently compared to other professions? Maybe it’s because it is a low risk job with really unusual benefits (2 months fixed leave every summer). Lots of people work for jobs that they love, it’s not unique to teaching. Comically, love of job drives salary down because it increases supply. If teachers hated their job the salaries would go up because it would decrease supply.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    There is no data on how many people don't choose to teach because of the perception of low wage and poor working conditions. I'm not even sure how you would measure that. I also can't think of another profession that has the same reputation. Most jobs have a reputation of either poor working conditions or low pay, or if they have both, are unskilled or low skilled positions. Teaching is the only job I can think of with low pay, poor conditions, and high skill required (a bachelor's+credential or master's degree).
defertoreptar 7y ago
> From the fall of 1987 through the fall of 2015, the number of public-school students increased by 20%, but the number of public-school teachers increased by 64%. More recently, in the four years leading up to the 2015-16 school year, teacher employment grew by 400,000, even as the number of students barely changed. The effect of supply and demand has on job markets gets mentioned too little when discussing whether salaries are fair. We can't at the same time be encouraging more students to become teachers and complain about salaries when demand for those positions don't dictate incentivizing the supply. A more productive discussion would be about nudging students toward career paths that need them. The article mentions there's a "premium" on nursing right now based on the method used to criticize teacher's pay. Maybe there's a good reason for that.
- smogcutter 7y ago
  I couldn’t find a citation in the article for those statistics, but they don’t smell right as an argument for teachers being oversupplied: - If the argument is that teacher pop growth outpaced student pop growth, therefore there’s an oversupply of teachers, that includes an implicit assumption that the 1987 ratio was correct. There’s no reason to assume that’s the case. - There’s been a great deal more attention paid to special ed in the past few decades. Changing special ed practices, like inclusion classrooms, also create more demand for special ed teachers to co-teach and work in the same classroom as general ed teachers. I don’t have figures but wouldn’t be surprised if that accounts for a chunk of the growth. - > If class sizes remain at today's levels, which are themselves much smaller than in the past... This, from the previous paragraph, is simply false. Per [1], student/teacher ratio in 1989 was 17.2, and in 2011 was 21.2 for elementary and 26.8 for secondary. Per [2] (Wikipedia, but it cites a real source), nationwide average secondary class size was 23.6 in 1992 and 23.4 in 2007. - If class sizes aren’t shrinking, what are all these “extra” teachers doing? A few guesses: special ed, teaching smaller or specialized classes in wealthier districts, or there’s something misleading about how they’re counting teachers. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_size#Class_size_through_history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_size#Class_size_throug...
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etrevino 7y ago
There's something missing from this. Teachers often buy classroom supplies themselves, instead of the district providing them. Yeah, they only spend about $479 on average [1], but it's still a pretty unique situation. 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-supplies.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/teachers-school-suppli...
tunesmith 7y ago
The entire opening of the article seems to be designed to take advantage of confirmation bias - the initial "there is no pay gap" is just an assertion, and then a bunch of therefores are built on top of it. 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.
- Florin_Andrei 7y ago
  The whole "article" is propaganda by a neocon think tank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute
  - DougPhillips88 7y ago
    And this contradicts their data... how, exactly?
    - OBLIQUE_PILLAR 7y ago
      Any paper put out by an extremely ideological think tank is going to present statistics in the most biased way possible, to try to prove their point.
    - harry8 7y ago
      It's additional data that is definitely worth knowing.
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skywhopper 7y ago
This article is a political screed, cherry-picking data to discredit a single source of data. There's no new useful data, or ideas about addressing problems in education. Its only purpose is to provide political cover for cutting education spending. Key detail: "Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute". Please remove.
- sethammons 7y ago
  I wish I could upvote you more. Nearly every paragraph and point is misconstruing data.
- all_blue_chucks 7y ago
  It's a criticism of publication from another political group. It's useful to be able to see the issue from both perspectives.
- DougPhillips88 7y ago
  Attacking the source and not the data is I guess all you can really do when you don't have the capacity to form an argument of your own.
yellowapple 7y ago
> Unlike in the EPI analysis, however, teachers (the black dots on the chart) receive a salary premium of 9% once their shorter work year is accounted for. This is exactly where the article fell apart for me. There is no "shorter work year". Assuming that a teacher has zero work responsibilities when school's "out" (even setting aside summer school programs, "track"-based schedules, etc.) betrays a gross misunderstanding of exactly how much work a typical teacher has to do outside of class hours. Lesson planning alone is a major time sink, especially at a middle or high school level when you'll often be teaching entirely different classes with entirely different curricula (for example: a history teacher might be teaching both regular and AP variants of both US History and US Government; this is, in fact, exactly what my grandpa did).
gridlockd 7y ago
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?
- Qwertystop 7y ago
  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.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    > I definitely learned _something_ from at least a few classes every year in K-12 What if the guy managing your retirement fund lost 85% of your money, would you stick with him because you got to keep at least some of it? > 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. Are you beginning to see a pattern here?
    - Qwertystop 7y ago
      My point is that public primary and secondary schooling seems to have been more effective (anecdotally) than private higher education. This is a strike against the idea that the government shouldn't be paying for it, in that in at least this one case the government paying for it seems to be working better than a non-government organization doing that doing so. Since educational institutions aren't going to disappear altogether, those are the alternatives.
vondur 7y ago
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.
ArtDev 7y ago
I was just talking to my daughter about why her teachers might be grumpy. Low pay, high stress, high responsibility jobs will do that. If you ever wonder if they underpaid, go ask one. They would be happy to complain, I am sure. "Well,I don't want to be a teacher",my daughter said. "Well I don't blame you", I said.
mikeryan 7y ago
The more I read articles in education based on national numbers the more I realize that national macroeconomic views are pretty much meaningless compared to local micro views. I don't care how much teachers make nationally, - I care how much teachers make at my local schools.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  I suppose then people elsewhere are expected not to care what teachers at your local school make then? Isn't politics about seeing a larger picture?
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Isn't politics about seeing a larger picture? No. In fact, there's a saying in politics: "All politics is local."
    - joe_the_user 7y ago
      There may be the saying "all politics is local politics" but this is hardly a proof of the situation. If anything, the worst politics happens through a purely local lens - for example, the refusal of silicon valley cities build housing for workers in the companies around them based on "local concerns".
      - reaperducer 7y ago
        There was no specification in the OP's comment about whether it's good or bad. But the fact remains that all politics is local. With the exception of the president, people vote for their local city government, their local county government, their local school board, their local senator, their local representative, and on the macro level (governor), they vote for the person who they think will best help their own, local interests.
        UncleEntity 7y ago
xer0x 7y ago
This article does not seem like the "truth". I'd really like it be true, and for our countries to value education. It doesn't seem like the case.
thrower123 7y ago
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 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.
- deleted 7y ago
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- mcguire 7y ago
  Unfortunately, those who you are buying things from rarely multiply their prices by 0.83 because you are a teacher. And you are indeed going to struggle to pull in the same kind of hourly rate for two months during the summer and one during the winter.
zarro 7y ago
The problem with the teacher pay to me is obvious, market forces aren't allowed to play themselves out. 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.
- neaden 7y ago
  Great. First thing we have to do is figure out a way to evaluate teacher school, something that I'm sure will be totally uncontroversial to do and not simply be a group of people bringing all their own biases in.
- mehhh 7y ago
  Stipend and educational "choice" programs rarely work as intended, hence the charter school movement withering in the US. Most alternative schools are like TM Landry, with profit or religous indoctrination often being the 1st priority, and actual education not being statistically different than what public schools offer.
- ghostly_s 7y ago
  Ah yes, Steve Jobs, noted expert on such topics as education and medicine.
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p4bl0 7y ago
The article is completely US-centric, but the subject isn't. Teacher's pay in France is quite low, from primary school to university. I'm an associate professor of compsci in France and, after 4 years, I make less than 2200€/month (it starts under 2000€ at the beginning). I should get to 3000€ 15 years from now. A typical mid- and high-school teacher is paid less than that and can only hope to get to 3000€ by the very end of their career. Most primary school teachers are paid just above the minimum legal salary which is a bit under 1200€.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Why do you do it? You could work at Google for a year and take a year off to do research and repeat indefinitely and still come off a lot better than you do now. There are contractors in London with no degree whatsoever who work six months a year and spend the rest in Thailand who make more than that, never mind Google.
filmgirlcw 7y ago
I'm not an educator but my mom is a retired school psychologist and my father used to be on my county's school board, so I grew up around teachers/educators. 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.
childofteacher 7y ago
The 10-month working year is a core issue here. It's hard to convince voters and other government workers that teachers deserve a X% or XX% raise, when teachers receive 2.5-3x (summer break, plus other holidays) more paid leave than the average American. That paid leave is worth something: I think many people would choose a job with a $50k salary and 10 weeks of leave over a $60k salary and 3 weeks of leave. The obvious fix would be to get rid of the summer break, and give teachers a ~20% increase in salary to compensate them for the increase in working days. This would solve other problems as well: Summer break causes serious childcare problems for working-class families, and research indicates that it probably hurts educational outcomes as well. However, this is unlikely to happen for various reasons: It would stretch (or over-stretch) the limited budgets of local school districts, and summer break is politically popular and has relatively powerful state-level lobbying from tourism-related businesses.
- brodouevencode 7y ago
  I've long been a proponent of the "block" schedule, but this would be a side benefit too. People are forgetting the economics of this and focusing in too much on the "teachers are heroes" thing. Teachers are paid what the market will bear. If the market pays too low, prospective teachers find other things to do. If the market pays too high, there will be more teachers coming in to the market. It's simple economics. As for the "teachers are heroes" thing: yes, they are heroes and so are firefighters, police, military, nurses, doctors, PAs, social workers, counselors, pharmacists, EMTs and other first responders, rehab administrators, volunteers, those doing compulsory community service, those doing volunteer community service, medical technicians, lab technicians, anyone working for a nonprofit, public works employees, linemen(and women), sewage treatment operators, and anyone else working in a job that keeps the public safe and educated and healthy. All of the aforementioned should be paid well for their services as long as the market will bear it. Why society has chosen to put teachers on a pedestal over the others - I'm not sure. They're all important. Let the market do what it's supposed to do and things will settle themselves.
- mattbreeden 7y ago
  My wife spends most of her summer 'break' working, including multiple weeks of it being required to be in the classroom or at district offices. Additionally, during the week, she works waaaay more than 40 hours a week, so even the time during the summer she isn't working I think is really just averaging out from her overtime during the school year. I wouldn't have a problem with her pay if she actually worked as much as detractors seem to think all teachers do, but her pay:time ratio is awful.
IkmoIkmo 7y ago
> (2) Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data. See, this is where things go wrong. So they've got mean wage figures which are constructed both on a fact (hourly wage) and an assumption (working hours). I know n=1 but, my girlfriend is a teacher and I see her working about 40 hours a week, for a 24h job. She has a 0.6 FTE contracted position (and an according 60% monthly salary), she's at the school about 4 days a week. On her off-day, every single evening before work and after work, and at least one, sometimes two days of the weekend, she's grading papers, designing exams, preparing lessons, calling up parents, responding to students on their education platform (some saas application on laptop & phone) etc etc. There's no way she can handle a 1.0 position, she'd burn-out within 1 or 2 years. She knows this, all of her colleagues know this. Almost everyone works part-time. She does teach difficult classes (lots of kids from low socioeconomic background, crappy parents, many distractions, little socialisation skills etc etc) but even teaching 'easy' kids, you'll still top-out at 0.8 FTE for the same mental effort / working hours / strain of 1.0 FTE at a 'normal' job (like mine, corporate job at a financial institution). Hourly wages can't be straight-up compared between jobs high in mental or physical strain (e.g. teaching or construction) versus say an administrative office job. You just can't last 40 years working the former jobs at a full-time position. Not the average person.
- tapland 7y ago
  I used to work in fast food. I would gladly get paid less per hour for my current software development job than I was back then (as long as it was above making rent). It was a much more draining job and it's effects consumed every waking minute during work days and spending off-days just recovering. That kind of job should have risk bonuses. Significant ones. Most people just can't do that and pursue anything else. Getting stuck is a real fear.
  - matz1 7y ago
    Its relative, I have plenty of friend who work in restaurant, they wouldn't want to trade with my software job. True that software development job is physically lot less demanding but for them its mentally exhausting.
jonstewart 7y ago
The source needs some consideration. From Wikipedia on National Affairs: “National Affairs is a quarterly magazine in the United States about political affairs that was first published in September 2009. Its founding editor, Yuval Levin, and authors are typically considered to be conservative.[1][2] The magazine is published by National Affairs, Inc., which previously published the magazines The National Interest (1985–2001) and The Public Interest (1965–2005). National Affairs, Inc., was originally run by Irving Kristol, and featured board members such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick, and author Charles Murray.” Additionally one of the authors works at the American Enterprise Institute, ie., his job is to promote a politically conservative narrative on issues like these.
- danieltillett 7y ago
  All this means is we get a conservative spin on the question rather than the usual liberal one. I am yet to find in life a simple, one sided answer to a complex question.
  - articwombat 7y ago
    "All this means is we get a conservative spin on the question rather than the usual liberal one." You have excellently explained the purpose of comment you responded to.
nightbrawler 7y ago
My wife used to be a teacher and there is something I haven't seen mentioned and that is all the district support staff. Her district had literally hundreds of high paid support staff. Many were older former teachers that either wanted out of the classroom or were moved to a support position instead of being let go, often with a pay raise. Eliminating all the unnecessary support positions and dividing those salaries amongst teachers could result in a more balanced salary for teachers.
- sethammons 7y ago
  Back when I was teaching high school math in inner city San Bernardino, there were more administrators than teachers in the district. It didn't make sense.
heyiforgotmypwd 7y ago
This is very an ignorant, biased and misleading article. 1) Not every educator is a teacher. Teachers are paid the most and have the best organized labor representation, while substitute teachers and T-A's are lucky if they get enough hours to qualify for benefits. 2) Not everyone lives in a rich area of a big city. Smaller communities typically don't have the tax base to pay livable wages. Cost of living maybe less, but the absolute buying power of educators in rural area is next to nil. Also, here's some anecdotal personal data-points: - My half sister and her husband are special ed. T-A's. They're on food stamps. - Talk to elderly homeless, saner people. You'd be surprised how many were teachers or in the education.
- JaimeThompson 7y ago
  It comes from the American Enterprise Institute so it isn't exactly going to be friendly toward typical working citizens.
adamsea 7y ago
Let's also bear in mind that if we want to think of teaching as a high-skill profession equivalent to doctor, lawyer, software engineer, etc, then we should be looking at the upper end of professional salaries when evaluating teacher salaries, not the median. Considering the outcome a good teacher can have on the life a child (even though it may be hard to measure that) I think it makes sense to imagine teaching as such.
brodouevencode 7y ago
I want to do an analysis of the number of upvotes on a HN post versus the number of comments. I have a hunch that if the number of comments greatly exceeds the number of upvotes it's a politically charged post.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Yeah, it's the equivalent of being ratio'd on Twitter.
jshaqaw 7y ago
The article spends surprisingly little time valuing the retirement pension and benefits packages that teachers in a place like NY State receive. That would make this analysis more relevant.
OBLIQUE_PILLAR 7y ago
National Affairs dot com is published by the extreme right wing think tank The Claremont Institute, started by the man who came up with Barry Goldwater's line "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."
- colonCapitalDee 7y ago
  This is not true. National Affairs dot com is run by the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute.
thowthisaway 7y ago
most elementary school teachers are earning $95K+ in San Diego, CA.
markvdb 7y ago
Where does this come from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Affairs

144 points by autokill 7y ago

One of my relatives retired from teaching a couple of years ago. She had guaranteed raises every year and ended up making close to $100,000/year.

WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  On the east and west coast, I've met quite a few teachers, and none have a 3 month break every year. Maybe a few weeks, but they are frequently tasked with continuing education or some other task during the summers. And during the year, they're always working 12+ hour days.
  - negzero7 7y ago
    I think the "always working 12+ hour days" thing is a myth. My wife is a teacher and I would say her and the teachers she works with will occasionally work extra hours, but by far it's mostly 7.5 hour days (8:30am - 4pm).
    - jedberg 7y ago
      I think that's the difference between a good teacher and an average one. My wife was a teacher (left because of the poor salary). She worked 12+ hours a day five days a week (we made sure to keep weekends open but we were there on weekends too sometimes). You could see which other teachers were there 12+ hours. It was the ones that sent the most prepared kids to her class. There was an obvious quality difference between the kids who had teachers that worked 12+ hours a day and those that didn't.
    - shantly 7y ago
      Depends on the grade and subject. Some teachers have a whole lot more grading to do than others. And some grading or planning is slower-going than others. Also some schools are better about keeping time clear during the day for teachers to plan & grade than others.
  - WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
    New teachers are the ones that get the 12hr days. I knew a teacher that told me the early days were hard since he had to develop the lessons and there was a learning curve too but at some point, his days got shorter and it got more enjoyable.
- igetspam 7y ago
  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.
  - H1Supreme 7y ago
    > The three month break is a myth. 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).
  - WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
    > $40-50k is not enough money to live on, in most places. But it's not just the pay. They get very nice benefits too. Yes, it's not a luxurious job but it's a good middle-class job. All workers cry poverty when it comes to pay but for the most part U.S. teachers don't fall in that track.
- negzero7 7y ago
  Along with the other commenters, the 3 month break isn't accurate. It tends to work out closer to about 7 weeks off. I do agree that I also could never do their job! (Source: My wife is a teacher)
  - WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
    >7 weeks off not 12 weeks but 7 is still nice...
3JPLW 7y ago
Good for her! Unfortunately, your anecdote is not representative. Many older teachers are getting forced out because, well, they're expensive and new teachers are underpaid. https://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/ https://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > Unfortunately, your anecdote is not representative. Of teachers starting today? Probably not. Older government employees often had ludicrously lucrative compensation packages compared to what we have now. It may or may not depending on what group we're talking about. > Many older teachers are getting forced out because, well, they're expensive Do you have information for that one, the link provided just lists starting and average salaries.
  - eesmith 7y ago
    What you describe as "ludicrously lucrative", I prefer to describe as "reasonable". I mean, couldn't I equally well say that the compensation packages we have now are ludicrously miserly?
- julianapostate 7y ago
  fyi for anyone curious on that source.. those numbers come from america's largest labor union and professional interest group for public school teachers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Association
iamalexm 7y ago
Still low for required education. Also, the raises haven't matched inflation; but that's a larger problem across all jobs.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  The required education doesn’t help the students so why reward it? Education degrees and continuing professional education have no reliably detectable effect on teacher effectiveness. Experience does, up to six years, and subject matter expertise does, so teachers with a Master’s in Chemistry get better results than ones with just a Bachelor’s but the qualifications most people are talking about are in pedagogy, which has no effect. And it’s not like it’s a secret that the average Ed school degree is a joke, even if you don’t count the bloated Master’s degree that is an Ed.D.

marricks 7y ago

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 wage, my points still stand about houses or college, and it’s not like her wages will go up much.

shantly 7y ago
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. That wasn't so bad before we had kids, but it's really shitty now. Lots of her co-workers work second jobs to make ends meet. Luckily for us I make a whole lot more than she does, which is dumb because she both does way more good than me and works much harder.
- pkaye 7y ago
  The teachers union in my city basically negotiated a deal for higher pay but the union would self fund their health benefits. It turned out to be a bad deal because over the years health care costs skyrocketed compared to the pay increases. What amazed me is some teachers are mentioning premiums higher than the individual market rates. So apparently they can't even negotiate good group premiums.
  - shantly 7y ago
    School district controls ours but this year they were all "the bad news is ya'll got sick too much so the rates are going up and deductible's worse, the good news is it's only going up 10% this year and, oh, probably forever into the future every year, and no we didn't get a second quote, the insurers told us they didn't even make any money on us last year." There's a shocking amount of incompetence and corruption in school admin. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which.

vkhn 7y ago

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 average 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals". My wife is a teacher, and I can tell you exactly why. Also, I laughed particularly hard at "teaching jobs are not particularly stressful or unpleasant compared to other occupations" Hilarious.

H1Supreme 7y ago
> My wife is a teacher, and I can tell you exactly why. Which is?
- karl11 7y ago
  They do a ton of work at home outside of school hours.
  - ydnaclementine 7y ago
    But according to this study, they aren’t and are only working ~40 hours. So who’s misunderstanding, this study that used time diaries from teachers or what the other teachers say? Both sources are self reported. I was expecting this study to ignore the extra hours that teachers put in away from the kids, but they seem to account for that.
    - Florin_Andrei 7y ago
      The "article" was produced by a neocon think tank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute It's a "study" in the sense that a blog by the American Tobacco Association (fictional entity invented for the purpose of this argument) produces "studies" about the "harmlessness of tobacco smoking".

Someone1234 7y ago

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 related). Personally I think someone required to have a degree (master's for quoted salary), continued education requirements, and licensing earning under $50K/year starting is too low. Plus no teacher is working 8-3, you'd have no opportunity for lesson planning, grading, and all those extra curriculars they are essentially guilted into organizing. The fact that I could walk out of college with zero experience and only a degree, and earn $20K more than that working only 9-5 in the same city seems unfair (as a programmer). But I have no idea how society decides salaries. It seems pretty arbitrary from my perspective. But it is great that at the end of a long career a few unicorn teachers can earn $100K, a salary I earned within 5 years and still no master's or licencing.

SamuelAdams 7y ago
> required to have a masters degree This isn't true from my experience. I have several friends who teach K-12 education. They only have a bachelor's degree, many times in different areas than what they are teaching (English degree teaching Math, for example).
- Someone1234 7y ago
  I updated the wording a little to be clearer. I was trying to say, to earn $50K starting salary quoted as a teacher you were required to have a master's degree ($43K otherwise ($45K otherwise)).
- noer 7y ago
  It varies state to state. Some states require you to have a masters degree, some require you to have a masters degree or being the process of obtaining one, some states require you to have a masters but will waive that requirement if there's a need and some states require only a bachelors degree. Edit: there is a list of state requirements here: https://www.asha.org/Advocacy/state/StateTeacherCredentialingRequirements/ https://www.asha.org/Advocacy/state/StateTeacherCredentialin...

SamuelAdams 7y ago

Why not just go directly to the source? https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#25-0000 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 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. But I wonder how many teachers are new versus how many stay in the field a long time? I also wonder how location-dependent these salaries are.

mdorazio 7y ago
I think it's more useful to look at new teacher salaries by state to get around tenure and averaging effects [1]. Fine vs. not fine varies a lot by location in this list. [1] http://www.nea.org/home/2017-2018-average-starting-teacher-salary.html http://www.nea.org/home/2017-2018-average-starting-teacher-s...
- hunterloftis 7y ago
  For others who might be interested, the lowest starting salary listed is Montanta ($31,418), highest is DC ($55,209). Scaled up from 10 months to 12 months of work, that's $37,702 and $66,251, respectively. The median household income is $53,386 in Montana and $82,372 in DC [1][2]. In both cases, even the un-scaled teacher's salary easily accounts for half of a typical household's income. So even without tenure and averaging effects, this data backs up the article's claims. 1. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/washington-dc/ https://datausa.io/profile/geo/washington-dc/ 2. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/montana https://datausa.io/profile/geo/montana
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humanrebar 7y ago
It didn't feel good as a teenager to hear teachers complain about education levels, workload, and salary when my intelligent and hard-working parents made less, worked as much, and had much less employment certainty.

jedberg 7y ago

You'll notice a lot of people commenting here "my wife is a teacher" (myself included). I think these statistics are missing two very big factors. - In high cost areas like the Silicon Valley, almost every teacher is married to an engineer or is the child of an engineer. That is why they don't need a second job. Because they have a support network. - Teacher quits are low because most of the people who would be great teachers simply never get into the job because of the crappy pay and work conditions. The people who are the best at it could easily get other jobs. My wife if a great example -- during the summer she worked a temp job in the first few years that was basically a management job that would have an annual salary in the six figure range. She only kept doing teaching because she loved it and because I made enough money to support us.

Florin_Andrei 7y ago
> That is why they don't need a second job. Because they have a support network. If an alien visitor to Earth was looking at this sorry situation, they could make some interesting assumptions about the priorities of this society and culture, as a whole, with regards to education.
prepend 7y ago
There’s actual data on both points you make. These anecdotes and conjectures are not very valuable. There are high quit rates in other industries that would have the same loss of potentially awesome staff as well. Why do teachers quit so infrequently compared to other professions? Maybe it’s because it is a low risk job with really unusual benefits (2 months fixed leave every summer). Lots of people work for jobs that they love, it’s not unique to teaching. Comically, love of job drives salary down because it increases supply. If teachers hated their job the salaries would go up because it would decrease supply.
- jedberg 7y ago
  There is no data on how many people don't choose to teach because of the perception of low wage and poor working conditions. I'm not even sure how you would measure that. I also can't think of another profession that has the same reputation. Most jobs have a reputation of either poor working conditions or low pay, or if they have both, are unskilled or low skilled positions. Teaching is the only job I can think of with low pay, poor conditions, and high skill required (a bachelor's+credential or master's degree).

defertoreptar 7y ago

> From the fall of 1987 through the fall of 2015, the number of public-school students increased by 20%, but the number of public-school teachers increased by 64%. More recently, in the four years leading up to the 2015-16 school year, teacher employment grew by 400,000, even as the number of students barely changed. The effect of supply and demand has on job markets gets mentioned too little when discussing whether salaries are fair. We can't at the same time be encouraging more students to become teachers and complain about salaries when demand for those positions don't dictate incentivizing the supply. A more productive discussion would be about nudging students toward career paths that need them. The article mentions there's a "premium" on nursing right now based on the method used to criticize teacher's pay. Maybe there's a good reason for that.

smogcutter 7y ago
I couldn’t find a citation in the article for those statistics, but they don’t smell right as an argument for teachers being oversupplied: - If the argument is that teacher pop growth outpaced student pop growth, therefore there’s an oversupply of teachers, that includes an implicit assumption that the 1987 ratio was correct. There’s no reason to assume that’s the case. - There’s been a great deal more attention paid to special ed in the past few decades. Changing special ed practices, like inclusion classrooms, also create more demand for special ed teachers to co-teach and work in the same classroom as general ed teachers. I don’t have figures but wouldn’t be surprised if that accounts for a chunk of the growth. - > If class sizes remain at today's levels, which are themselves much smaller than in the past... This, from the previous paragraph, is simply false. Per [1], student/teacher ratio in 1989 was 17.2, and in 2011 was 21.2 for elementary and 26.8 for secondary. Per [2] (Wikipedia, but it cites a real source), nationwide average secondary class size was 23.6 in 1992 and 23.4 in 2007. - If class sizes aren’t shrinking, what are all these “extra” teachers doing? A few guesses: special ed, teaching smaller or specialized classes in wealthier districts, or there’s something misleading about how they’re counting teachers. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28 [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_size#Class_size_through_history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_size#Class_size_throug...
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etrevino 7y ago

There's something missing from this. Teachers often buy classroom supplies themselves, instead of the district providing them. Yeah, they only spend about $479 on average [1], but it's still a pretty unique situation. 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-supplies.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/teachers-school-suppli...

tunesmith 7y ago

The entire opening of the article seems to be designed to take advantage of confirmation bias - the initial "there is no pay gap" is just an assertion, and then a bunch of therefores are built on top of it. 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.

Florin_Andrei 7y ago
The whole "article" is propaganda by a neocon think tank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute
- DougPhillips88 7y ago
  And this contradicts their data... how, exactly?
  - OBLIQUE_PILLAR 7y ago
    Any paper put out by an extremely ideological think tank is going to present statistics in the most biased way possible, to try to prove their point.
  - harry8 7y ago
    It's additional data that is definitely worth knowing.
  - 7y ago

skywhopper 7y ago

This article is a political screed, cherry-picking data to discredit a single source of data. There's no new useful data, or ideas about addressing problems in education. Its only purpose is to provide political cover for cutting education spending. Key detail: "Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute". Please remove.

sethammons 7y ago
I wish I could upvote you more. Nearly every paragraph and point is misconstruing data.
all_blue_chucks 7y ago
It's a criticism of publication from another political group. It's useful to be able to see the issue from both perspectives.
DougPhillips88 7y ago
Attacking the source and not the data is I guess all you can really do when you don't have the capacity to form an argument of your own.

yellowapple 7y ago

> Unlike in the EPI analysis, however, teachers (the black dots on the chart) receive a salary premium of 9% once their shorter work year is accounted for. This is exactly where the article fell apart for me. There is no "shorter work year". Assuming that a teacher has zero work responsibilities when school's "out" (even setting aside summer school programs, "track"-based schedules, etc.) betrays a gross misunderstanding of exactly how much work a typical teacher has to do outside of class hours. Lesson planning alone is a major time sink, especially at a middle or high school level when you'll often be teaching entirely different classes with entirely different curricula (for example: a history teacher might be teaching both regular and AP variants of both US History and US Government; this is, in fact, exactly what my grandpa did).

gridlockd 7y ago

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?

Qwertystop 7y ago
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.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > I definitely learned _something_ from at least a few classes every year in K-12 What if the guy managing your retirement fund lost 85% of your money, would you stick with him because you got to keep at least some of it? > 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. Are you beginning to see a pattern here?
  - Qwertystop 7y ago
    My point is that public primary and secondary schooling seems to have been more effective (anecdotally) than private higher education. This is a strike against the idea that the government shouldn't be paying for it, in that in at least this one case the government paying for it seems to be working better than a non-government organization doing that doing so. Since educational institutions aren't going to disappear altogether, those are the alternatives.

vondur 7y ago

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.

ArtDev 7y ago

I was just talking to my daughter about why her teachers might be grumpy. Low pay, high stress, high responsibility jobs will do that. If you ever wonder if they underpaid, go ask one. They would be happy to complain, I am sure. "Well,I don't want to be a teacher",my daughter said. "Well I don't blame you", I said.

mikeryan 7y ago

The more I read articles in education based on national numbers the more I realize that national macroeconomic views are pretty much meaningless compared to local micro views. I don't care how much teachers make nationally, - I care how much teachers make at my local schools.

joe_the_user 7y ago
I suppose then people elsewhere are expected not to care what teachers at your local school make then? Isn't politics about seeing a larger picture?
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Isn't politics about seeing a larger picture? No. In fact, there's a saying in politics: "All politics is local."
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    There may be the saying "all politics is local politics" but this is hardly a proof of the situation. If anything, the worst politics happens through a purely local lens - for example, the refusal of silicon valley cities build housing for workers in the companies around them based on "local concerns".
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      There was no specification in the OP's comment about whether it's good or bad. But the fact remains that all politics is local. With the exception of the president, people vote for their local city government, their local county government, their local school board, their local senator, their local representative, and on the macro level (governor), they vote for the person who they think will best help their own, local interests.
      - UncleEntity 7y ago

xer0x 7y ago

This article does not seem like the "truth". I'd really like it be true, and for our countries to value education. It doesn't seem like the case.

thrower123 7y ago

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 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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mcguire 7y ago
Unfortunately, those who you are buying things from rarely multiply their prices by 0.83 because you are a teacher. And you are indeed going to struggle to pull in the same kind of hourly rate for two months during the summer and one during the winter.

zarro 7y ago

The problem with the teacher pay to me is obvious, market forces aren't allowed to play themselves out. 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.

neaden 7y ago
Great. First thing we have to do is figure out a way to evaluate teacher school, something that I'm sure will be totally uncontroversial to do and not simply be a group of people bringing all their own biases in.
mehhh 7y ago
Stipend and educational "choice" programs rarely work as intended, hence the charter school movement withering in the US. Most alternative schools are like TM Landry, with profit or religous indoctrination often being the 1st priority, and actual education not being statistically different than what public schools offer.
ghostly_s 7y ago
Ah yes, Steve Jobs, noted expert on such topics as education and medicine.
- 7y ago

p4bl0 7y ago

The article is completely US-centric, but the subject isn't. Teacher's pay in France is quite low, from primary school to university. I'm an associate professor of compsci in France and, after 4 years, I make less than 2200€/month (it starts under 2000€ at the beginning). I should get to 3000€ 15 years from now. A typical mid- and high-school teacher is paid less than that and can only hope to get to 3000€ by the very end of their career. Most primary school teachers are paid just above the minimum legal salary which is a bit under 1200€.

barry-cotter 7y ago
Why do you do it? You could work at Google for a year and take a year off to do research and repeat indefinitely and still come off a lot better than you do now. There are contractors in London with no degree whatsoever who work six months a year and spend the rest in Thailand who make more than that, never mind Google.

filmgirlcw 7y ago

I'm not an educator but my mom is a retired school psychologist and my father used to be on my county's school board, so I grew up around teachers/educators. 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.

childofteacher 7y ago

The 10-month working year is a core issue here. It's hard to convince voters and other government workers that teachers deserve a X% or XX% raise, when teachers receive 2.5-3x (summer break, plus other holidays) more paid leave than the average American. That paid leave is worth something: I think many people would choose a job with a $50k salary and 10 weeks of leave over a $60k salary and 3 weeks of leave. The obvious fix would be to get rid of the summer break, and give teachers a ~20% increase in salary to compensate them for the increase in working days. This would solve other problems as well: Summer break causes serious childcare problems for working-class families, and research indicates that it probably hurts educational outcomes as well. However, this is unlikely to happen for various reasons: It would stretch (or over-stretch) the limited budgets of local school districts, and summer break is politically popular and has relatively powerful state-level lobbying from tourism-related businesses.

brodouevencode 7y ago
I've long been a proponent of the "block" schedule, but this would be a side benefit too. People are forgetting the economics of this and focusing in too much on the "teachers are heroes" thing. Teachers are paid what the market will bear. If the market pays too low, prospective teachers find other things to do. If the market pays too high, there will be more teachers coming in to the market. It's simple economics. As for the "teachers are heroes" thing: yes, they are heroes and so are firefighters, police, military, nurses, doctors, PAs, social workers, counselors, pharmacists, EMTs and other first responders, rehab administrators, volunteers, those doing compulsory community service, those doing volunteer community service, medical technicians, lab technicians, anyone working for a nonprofit, public works employees, linemen(and women), sewage treatment operators, and anyone else working in a job that keeps the public safe and educated and healthy. All of the aforementioned should be paid well for their services as long as the market will bear it. Why society has chosen to put teachers on a pedestal over the others - I'm not sure. They're all important. Let the market do what it's supposed to do and things will settle themselves.
mattbreeden 7y ago
My wife spends most of her summer 'break' working, including multiple weeks of it being required to be in the classroom or at district offices. Additionally, during the week, she works waaaay more than 40 hours a week, so even the time during the summer she isn't working I think is really just averaging out from her overtime during the school year. I wouldn't have a problem with her pay if she actually worked as much as detractors seem to think all teachers do, but her pay:time ratio is awful.

IkmoIkmo 7y ago

> (2) Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data. See, this is where things go wrong. So they've got mean wage figures which are constructed both on a fact (hourly wage) and an assumption (working hours). I know n=1 but, my girlfriend is a teacher and I see her working about 40 hours a week, for a 24h job. She has a 0.6 FTE contracted position (and an according 60% monthly salary), she's at the school about 4 days a week. On her off-day, every single evening before work and after work, and at least one, sometimes two days of the weekend, she's grading papers, designing exams, preparing lessons, calling up parents, responding to students on their education platform (some saas application on laptop & phone) etc etc. There's no way she can handle a 1.0 position, she'd burn-out within 1 or 2 years. She knows this, all of her colleagues know this. Almost everyone works part-time. She does teach difficult classes (lots of kids from low socioeconomic background, crappy parents, many distractions, little socialisation skills etc etc) but even teaching 'easy' kids, you'll still top-out at 0.8 FTE for the same mental effort / working hours / strain of 1.0 FTE at a 'normal' job (like mine, corporate job at a financial institution). Hourly wages can't be straight-up compared between jobs high in mental or physical strain (e.g. teaching or construction) versus say an administrative office job. You just can't last 40 years working the former jobs at a full-time position. Not the average person.

tapland 7y ago
I used to work in fast food. I would gladly get paid less per hour for my current software development job than I was back then (as long as it was above making rent). It was a much more draining job and it's effects consumed every waking minute during work days and spending off-days just recovering. That kind of job should have risk bonuses. Significant ones. Most people just can't do that and pursue anything else. Getting stuck is a real fear.
- matz1 7y ago
  Its relative, I have plenty of friend who work in restaurant, they wouldn't want to trade with my software job. True that software development job is physically lot less demanding but for them its mentally exhausting.

jonstewart 7y ago

The source needs some consideration. From Wikipedia on National Affairs: “National Affairs is a quarterly magazine in the United States about political affairs that was first published in September 2009. Its founding editor, Yuval Levin, and authors are typically considered to be conservative.[1][2] The magazine is published by National Affairs, Inc., which previously published the magazines The National Interest (1985–2001) and The Public Interest (1965–2005). National Affairs, Inc., was originally run by Irving Kristol, and featured board members such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick, and author Charles Murray.” Additionally one of the authors works at the American Enterprise Institute, ie., his job is to promote a politically conservative narrative on issues like these.

danieltillett 7y ago
All this means is we get a conservative spin on the question rather than the usual liberal one. I am yet to find in life a simple, one sided answer to a complex question.
- articwombat 7y ago
  "All this means is we get a conservative spin on the question rather than the usual liberal one." You have excellently explained the purpose of comment you responded to.

nightbrawler 7y ago

My wife used to be a teacher and there is something I haven't seen mentioned and that is all the district support staff. Her district had literally hundreds of high paid support staff. Many were older former teachers that either wanted out of the classroom or were moved to a support position instead of being let go, often with a pay raise. Eliminating all the unnecessary support positions and dividing those salaries amongst teachers could result in a more balanced salary for teachers.

sethammons 7y ago
Back when I was teaching high school math in inner city San Bernardino, there were more administrators than teachers in the district. It didn't make sense.

heyiforgotmypwd 7y ago

This is very an ignorant, biased and misleading article. 1) Not every educator is a teacher. Teachers are paid the most and have the best organized labor representation, while substitute teachers and T-A's are lucky if they get enough hours to qualify for benefits. 2) Not everyone lives in a rich area of a big city. Smaller communities typically don't have the tax base to pay livable wages. Cost of living maybe less, but the absolute buying power of educators in rural area is next to nil. Also, here's some anecdotal personal data-points: - My half sister and her husband are special ed. T-A's. They're on food stamps. - Talk to elderly homeless, saner people. You'd be surprised how many were teachers or in the education.

JaimeThompson 7y ago
It comes from the American Enterprise Institute so it isn't exactly going to be friendly toward typical working citizens.

adamsea 7y ago

Let's also bear in mind that if we want to think of teaching as a high-skill profession equivalent to doctor, lawyer, software engineer, etc, then we should be looking at the upper end of professional salaries when evaluating teacher salaries, not the median. Considering the outcome a good teacher can have on the life a child (even though it may be hard to measure that) I think it makes sense to imagine teaching as such.

brodouevencode 7y ago

I want to do an analysis of the number of upvotes on a HN post versus the number of comments. I have a hunch that if the number of comments greatly exceeds the number of upvotes it's a politically charged post.

scarejunba 7y ago
Yeah, it's the equivalent of being ratio'd on Twitter.

jshaqaw 7y ago

The article spends surprisingly little time valuing the retirement pension and benefits packages that teachers in a place like NY State receive. That would make this analysis more relevant.

OBLIQUE_PILLAR 7y ago

National Affairs dot com is published by the extreme right wing think tank The Claremont Institute, started by the man who came up with Barry Goldwater's line "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

colonCapitalDee 7y ago
This is not true. National Affairs dot com is run by the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute.

thowthisaway 7y ago

most elementary school teachers are earning $95K+ in San Diego, CA.

markvdb 7y ago

Where does this come from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Affairs