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https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-compensation-public-school-teachers https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-comp... > W

https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-compensation-public-school-teachers https://www.heritage.org/education/report/assessing-the-comp... > Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid. https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-assessing-teacher-compensation https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as... > Our recent report, “Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers,” [1] concluded that, on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries.

mattkrause 5y ago
The analysis is harder than that. I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead. Zooming in a bit…the big “fringe benefit” is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that it’s linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet that’s not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  > I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that. https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-masters-degree-pay-bump-for-teachers/?amp https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-mast... > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.[1] > This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers. [1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775710001755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
  - mlyle 5y ago
    > This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that. This is orthogonal to what he is discussing; he's just discussing the relative pay picture (in-profession vs. out of profession) for one who holds such a degree. > > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees This is -further- orthogonal and off-topic, because we're not talking about the relative merits of graduate education for teachers compared to bachelors degrees.
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    > This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. Not necessarily. It might just be an artifact of mandatory certifications. Suppose that teacher training were completely useless (debatable), but nevertheless legally required (mostly true, esp. for public schools) and expensive in terms of time or money (definitely true). I think you’d still expect increased earnings in those who obtained the certification, if only because they are now eligible for jobs where the supply of potential employees is limited. If they leave the industry, however, that certification often counts for very little, and the pay bump disappears. None of this, of course, tells you anything about conditions across industries. The quotes in your comment are missing some important context. As §2.1 of the linked paper says, nearly all teachers in the US are somehow licensed, but this can be part of an education degree or an “alternative certification” for those with other degrees. Those two types of training are what the paper compares, not trained vs totally untrained. Critically, both take time and money. The advanced degree data is also hard to interpret. It could be that a masters is totally worthless. However, selection effects also seem possible: teachers with more training could be given more challenging students or courses, or, as the paper proposes, underperforming teachers could preferentially do a masters to shore up their skills. They could also have more out-of-classroom responsibilities (e.g., curriculum development or admin), which would be consistent with how advanced degrees work in many other fields. Anyway, all this is to say that “haha teachers are overpaid dummies” is, IMO, too simplistic and not supported by the data either.
- jliptzin 5y ago
  I would say it’s the opposite. Vacation time has more incremental value the longer it goes on. Even a 2 week vacation I’d have trouble fully unwinding from. An entire summer, you can truly have some quality time to yourself to recharge, focus on a hobby, travel a lot, etc. I would say those summers off are easily worth $100k.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Too bad it's vacation time when everyone else is having vacation, so everything is crowded.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      The saving grace is that it’s synchro with your kids’ vacations.
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    It’s tricky. Taking things to an obviously absurd extreme, being unemployed is clearly not worth $400k/year: people work for far, far less. As you say, longer blocks of vacation time definitely open up new possibilities, but perhaps there’s an inflection point: an 11-week trip seems like it’d be very nearly the same as a 10 week one. Things get weird when much of the total comp is in benefits. For example, if your cash salary is $50k, that limits what you can do with your $100k “worth” of vacation.
makeitdouble 5y ago
From the same report, the bullet point above your first quote: > The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education. That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession. Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job. I feel it’s like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value. Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, I’d look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldn’t move. And it’s not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he can’t take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.
- rcpt 5y ago
  heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw
  - N1H1L 5y ago
    Yes as soon as I saw Heritage I knew that they would be pushing a agenda that would make Ayn Rand blush.
  - mhuffman 5y ago
    >heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw There is no good source on "this kind of thing"! This is a type of "Wicked Problem"[1] and also a political darling of every political group. And since every social scientist is just a person, with political, personal, and moral beliefs, any papers that they are willing to release typically reflect that. Further, any "peers" that review those papers will have similar beliefs because they know which places they would like that info published. If you have pretty progressive beliefs, you will "know" that more money, in combination with identity awareness and additional help to those that match historically oppressed identities, is the answer. If you have pretty conservative beliefs, you will "know" that it is the environment, "brainwashed" and "lazy" teachers and students (but not your kids, of course!) that are the blame. Vouchers and private schools (letting the market work) are the answer. And there are people with beliefs everywhere on that spectrum. And not matter your beliefs, you can find research to back it up. Education is just something that will forever be argued about and there is no clear-cut solution, even though nearly everyone thinks that there is, if only everyone else could just understand their point of view!. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
AJ007 5y ago
Obnoxious that your comment was downvoted. Just examining retirement benefits, public pensions pay out what would take a normal worker multiple millions of dollars of wealth to receive.
ericd 5y ago
I had one amazing high school math teacher who graduated from MIT at 18, and was teaching all the way up to diff eq in public schools. He’d made his money and then decided to teach because he was annoyed that his sons’ math teachers sucked. There’s absolutely no way teacher salary+pension was competitive with what he was making in industry. And we should want a lot more people who are like him teaching, without the needing them to be lucky enough to not need to care about money.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Not necessarily. People who are really smart and great in industry are not necessarily great teachers. Frankly, if you are talking about making the salary competitive with one that allows FIRE will have the opposite effect that you want (ideology vs money).
  - thundergolfer 5y ago
    Are you saying that FIRE type people are ill suited for teaching because their interest is in minimising retirement age and not being good teachers? The ideology of “earning to retire” vs. “living to teach”?
    - giantg2 5y ago
      I'm saying that if you pay teachers a salary consistent with an MIT grad that was able to FIRE, that you will attract people solely for the money. If we are compensating teachers at 4-5x the median salary, then I would gladly quit my job and become a teacher even though I have no real interest in it. I believe that the best teachers enjoy their jobs and are not just looking for the money. Now we could use a performance based pay system that could pay teachers more. Some of those systems fail to capture the right metrics. All of them are opposed by the teachers union. I think a slightly below average salary (factoring in benefits which are not typically seen in industry) with the potential to make more than average based on performance would be a good system.
      - 5y ago
thundergolfer 5y ago
Regarding the first quote, it’s not the opposite of what you’d expect if teaching was a low-status profession that could only attract weaker, lower paid labourers. Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well. If teaching is low-status it is no wonder that education standards are low and thus educational achievement is low, as they note in the article. The alternative is failing most students and having a labour supply problem. In my country, Australia, you occasionally see news articles describing some shockingly bad final year high school scores (ATAR scores) being accepted into teaching degrees. Unfortunately, the fact that this happens further entrenches teaching as low status and puts downward pressure on the minimum bar for ATAR scores. Remarkable, but unsurprising, that the Heritage foundation then suggests _lowering_ wages even further. You’ll get even worse candidates heading for teaching and they may even be able to next time show the same 9% positive bump.
- 6f8986c3 5y ago
  > Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well. You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. As a teacher, you have no control over your classroom. Disruptive students that destroy everybody else's learning environment? Too bad. No Child Left Behind! Wait, that's the old slogan, what's the new one? Equity Uber Alles? Equity Macht Frei? It changes so often, I keep forgetting. Assaulted by the kids? Suck it up, we don't want to be sued! Better to have a battered teacher -- the Unions will keep them in check -- than a lawyered-up parent. I have seen this first-hand. Want to actually teach kids things they need to learn to succeed? This is the wrong job for you. I know a lot of motivated folks that went into teaching, with big salary bonuses, full scholarships for their degrees, everything. None of them lasted more than four years. Public education in the US selects for Dolores Umbridge, and against Remis Lupin.
  - thomastjeffery 5y ago
    > You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. I sincerely doubt that. Having a teacher who isn't struggling financially would be a huge improvement.
giantg2 5y ago
"Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries." I agree. I have a friend that took a lower paying job because he could not stand the handcuffs that the administration placed on teachers. Stuff like you have to give people a 50% if they put their name on the paper, you can't discipline students effectively, etc. I also know many teachers at private schools that make less than the public school counterparts but would not switch due to similar reasons.
z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
You, clearly, have never taught in your life.
eldavido 5y ago
I see this happen a lot, where we need to make some kind of practical decision in politics (how much to pay teachers, how to set water rates), and it inevitably descends into an ideology-driven discussion of fairness, the meaning of life, and other similarly non-answerable questions. We have to reframe this for what it is, a person being paid to do a job. The overall issue here is that when you let values guide decision-making, there's no "right" answer. There is no "right" answer to how much the US should spend on health insurance. Likewise there is no "right" answer to what to pay teachers. The only way I see to solve this is to peg it to something set by a market. Markets operate under constraints. Maybe set pay (all-in including vacation, pension, benefits, etc) relative to a local private school that sets wages competitively based on what teachers can get vs what the school can afford to pay from fees. Modulate +/- 10% based on overall funding levels if you want to split hairs. The alternative is much worse: a big slugging match between taxpayers and well-organized special interests (e.g. teacher unions), and news flash, the special interests usually win, because it matters much more for them than for the average taxpayer, and they're better at playing the long game (e.g. organizing member rolls, getting members to show up to meetings/vote, knowing relevant laws, developing relationships with city management/school board members). This is a big part of why secondary education in the US sucks. In any other business, software development, architecture, law, manufacturing, the management has discretion to manage -- set wages and salaries, hire, fire, supervise, and hand out bonuses. School managers (administrators) are absolutely handcuffed by collective bargaining agreements that restrict how they hire, fire, and promote. You think I'm being hyperbolic? Tell me one other job, apart from a competitive process at a university, that gives people firing-proof "tenure". That's insane.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid. Its exactly what I'd expect if tecahers were underpaid but most switches from other jobs into teaching were from jobs taken as a student pre-qualification for entry-level teaching jobs and most switches out were post-retirement-from teaching “have something productive to do” jobs.
strken 5y ago
Teaching (in Australia, but the pattern in the US is similar although lower[0]) is known to have okay starting pay that doesn't scale with experience. I'd expect some interesting effects around tenure, because those who leave or enter teaching probably do so when they're at the start of their career, when their pay is most competitive. [0] As per https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-australia-it-starts-out-ok-but-goes-downhill-pretty-quickly-122782 https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-..., the US starts out below the bar for tertiary-educated workers and gets even lower
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > that doesn't scale with experience Is this true? I have several friends who are teachers in the US and they say they get pay raises for experience and for any extra accreditation they pursue. Which isn’t to remark on whether the pay is satisfactory, but I get the impression that the pay does increase and can do so pretty significantly.
  - strken 5y ago
    As per the linked article, it doesn't scale as well as other tertiary-educated workers.
tw04 5y ago
Call me surprised that a foundation that wants to kill public schooling says public school teachers are overpaid. Meanwhile my anecdotal rebuttal is I graduated with 6 folks who went into teaching. All 6 left to do other things and within 5 years were making more than they would have at the end of a 30 year teaching career.
typon 5y ago
Linking a heritage foundation study unironically. Is this the standard of this forum now?
XorNot 5y ago
"I'm going to quit this middle class job and go be a teacher, easy money" said literally no one ever including the OP here. "We just need better teachers" says a group composed of people who are entirely sure the profession is beneath them.

mattkrause 5y ago

The analysis is harder than that. I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead. Zooming in a bit…the big “fringe benefit” is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that it’s linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet that’s not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.

barry-cotter 5y ago
> I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that. https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-masters-degree-pay-bump-for-teachers/?amp https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-profits-from-the-mast... > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees is one of the most consistent findings in education research. In a study published in 2011, Paul Peterson and I confirmed this finding by comparing the student achievement of the same teachers before and after they earned master’s degrees, and found no impact.[1] > This finding may be non-controversial among researchers, but it has largely been ignored by policymakers. [1] It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775710001755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
- mlyle 5y ago
  > This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. There is no strong evidence of that. This is orthogonal to what he is discussing; he's just discussing the relative pay picture (in-profession vs. out of profession) for one who holds such a degree. > > The fact that teachers with master’s degrees are no more effective in the classroom, on average, than their colleagues without advanced degrees This is -further- orthogonal and off-topic, because we're not talking about the relative merits of graduate education for teachers compared to bachelors degrees.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  > This would imply that education degrees make their recipients better educators. Not necessarily. It might just be an artifact of mandatory certifications. Suppose that teacher training were completely useless (debatable), but nevertheless legally required (mostly true, esp. for public schools) and expensive in terms of time or money (definitely true). I think you’d still expect increased earnings in those who obtained the certification, if only because they are now eligible for jobs where the supply of potential employees is limited. If they leave the industry, however, that certification often counts for very little, and the pay bump disappears. None of this, of course, tells you anything about conditions across industries. The quotes in your comment are missing some important context. As §2.1 of the linked paper says, nearly all teachers in the US are somehow licensed, but this can be part of an education degree or an “alternative certification” for those with other degrees. Those two types of training are what the paper compares, not trained vs totally untrained. Critically, both take time and money. The advanced degree data is also hard to interpret. It could be that a masters is totally worthless. However, selection effects also seem possible: teachers with more training could be given more challenging students or courses, or, as the paper proposes, underperforming teachers could preferentially do a masters to shore up their skills. They could also have more out-of-classroom responsibilities (e.g., curriculum development or admin), which would be consistent with how advanced degrees work in many other fields. Anyway, all this is to say that “haha teachers are overpaid dummies” is, IMO, too simplistic and not supported by the data either.
jliptzin 5y ago
I would say it’s the opposite. Vacation time has more incremental value the longer it goes on. Even a 2 week vacation I’d have trouble fully unwinding from. An entire summer, you can truly have some quality time to yourself to recharge, focus on a hobby, travel a lot, etc. I would say those summers off are easily worth $100k.
- toast0 5y ago
  Too bad it's vacation time when everyone else is having vacation, so everything is crowded.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    The saving grace is that it’s synchro with your kids’ vacations.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  It’s tricky. Taking things to an obviously absurd extreme, being unemployed is clearly not worth $400k/year: people work for far, far less. As you say, longer blocks of vacation time definitely open up new possibilities, but perhaps there’s an inflection point: an 11-week trip seems like it’d be very nearly the same as a 10 week one. Things get weird when much of the total comp is in benefits. For example, if your cash salary is $50k, that limits what you can do with your $100k “worth” of vacation.

makeitdouble 5y ago

From the same report, the bullet point above your first quote: > The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education. That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession. Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job. I feel it’s like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value. Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, I’d look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldn’t move. And it’s not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he can’t take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.

rcpt 5y ago
heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw
- N1H1L 5y ago
  Yes as soon as I saw Heritage I knew that they would be pushing a agenda that would make Ayn Rand blush.
- mhuffman 5y ago
  >heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw There is no good source on "this kind of thing"! This is a type of "Wicked Problem"[1] and also a political darling of every political group. And since every social scientist is just a person, with political, personal, and moral beliefs, any papers that they are willing to release typically reflect that. Further, any "peers" that review those papers will have similar beliefs because they know which places they would like that info published. If you have pretty progressive beliefs, you will "know" that more money, in combination with identity awareness and additional help to those that match historically oppressed identities, is the answer. If you have pretty conservative beliefs, you will "know" that it is the environment, "brainwashed" and "lazy" teachers and students (but not your kids, of course!) that are the blame. Vouchers and private schools (letting the market work) are the answer. And there are people with beliefs everywhere on that spectrum. And not matter your beliefs, you can find research to back it up. Education is just something that will forever be argued about and there is no clear-cut solution, even though nearly everyone thinks that there is, if only everyone else could just understand their point of view!. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

AJ007 5y ago

Obnoxious that your comment was downvoted. Just examining retirement benefits, public pensions pay out what would take a normal worker multiple millions of dollars of wealth to receive.

ericd 5y ago

I had one amazing high school math teacher who graduated from MIT at 18, and was teaching all the way up to diff eq in public schools. He’d made his money and then decided to teach because he was annoyed that his sons’ math teachers sucked. There’s absolutely no way teacher salary+pension was competitive with what he was making in industry. And we should want a lot more people who are like him teaching, without the needing them to be lucky enough to not need to care about money.

giantg2 5y ago
Not necessarily. People who are really smart and great in industry are not necessarily great teachers. Frankly, if you are talking about making the salary competitive with one that allows FIRE will have the opposite effect that you want (ideology vs money).
- thundergolfer 5y ago
  Are you saying that FIRE type people are ill suited for teaching because their interest is in minimising retirement age and not being good teachers? The ideology of “earning to retire” vs. “living to teach”?
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I'm saying that if you pay teachers a salary consistent with an MIT grad that was able to FIRE, that you will attract people solely for the money. If we are compensating teachers at 4-5x the median salary, then I would gladly quit my job and become a teacher even though I have no real interest in it. I believe that the best teachers enjoy their jobs and are not just looking for the money. Now we could use a performance based pay system that could pay teachers more. Some of those systems fail to capture the right metrics. All of them are opposed by the teachers union. I think a slightly below average salary (factoring in benefits which are not typically seen in industry) with the potential to make more than average based on performance would be a good system.
    - 5y ago

thundergolfer 5y ago

Regarding the first quote, it’s not the opposite of what you’d expect if teaching was a low-status profession that could only attract weaker, lower paid labourers. Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well. If teaching is low-status it is no wonder that education standards are low and thus educational achievement is low, as they note in the article. The alternative is failing most students and having a labour supply problem. In my country, Australia, you occasionally see news articles describing some shockingly bad final year high school scores (ATAR scores) being accepted into teaching degrees. Unfortunately, the fact that this happens further entrenches teaching as low status and puts downward pressure on the minimum bar for ATAR scores. Remarkable, but unsurprising, that the Heritage foundation then suggests _lowering_ wages even further. You’ll get even worse candidates heading for teaching and they may even be able to next time show the same 9% positive bump.

6f8986c3 5y ago
> Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well. You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. As a teacher, you have no control over your classroom. Disruptive students that destroy everybody else's learning environment? Too bad. No Child Left Behind! Wait, that's the old slogan, what's the new one? Equity Uber Alles? Equity Macht Frei? It changes so often, I keep forgetting. Assaulted by the kids? Suck it up, we don't want to be sued! Better to have a battered teacher -- the Unions will keep them in check -- than a lawyered-up parent. I have seen this first-hand. Want to actually teach kids things they need to learn to succeed? This is the wrong job for you. I know a lot of motivated folks that went into teaching, with big salary bonuses, full scholarships for their degrees, everything. None of them lasted more than four years. Public education in the US selects for Dolores Umbridge, and against Remis Lupin.
- thomastjeffery 5y ago
  > You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. I sincerely doubt that. Having a teacher who isn't struggling financially would be a huge improvement.

giantg2 5y ago

"Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries." I agree. I have a friend that took a lower paying job because he could not stand the handcuffs that the administration placed on teachers. Stuff like you have to give people a 50% if they put their name on the paper, you can't discipline students effectively, etc. I also know many teachers at private schools that make less than the public school counterparts but would not switch due to similar reasons.

z3ncyberpunk 5y ago

You, clearly, have never taught in your life.

eldavido 5y ago

I see this happen a lot, where we need to make some kind of practical decision in politics (how much to pay teachers, how to set water rates), and it inevitably descends into an ideology-driven discussion of fairness, the meaning of life, and other similarly non-answerable questions. We have to reframe this for what it is, a person being paid to do a job. The overall issue here is that when you let values guide decision-making, there's no "right" answer. There is no "right" answer to how much the US should spend on health insurance. Likewise there is no "right" answer to what to pay teachers. The only way I see to solve this is to peg it to something set by a market. Markets operate under constraints. Maybe set pay (all-in including vacation, pension, benefits, etc) relative to a local private school that sets wages competitively based on what teachers can get vs what the school can afford to pay from fees. Modulate +/- 10% based on overall funding levels if you want to split hairs. The alternative is much worse: a big slugging match between taxpayers and well-organized special interests (e.g. teacher unions), and news flash, the special interests usually win, because it matters much more for them than for the average taxpayer, and they're better at playing the long game (e.g. organizing member rolls, getting members to show up to meetings/vote, knowing relevant laws, developing relationships with city management/school board members). This is a big part of why secondary education in the US sucks. In any other business, software development, architecture, law, manufacturing, the management has discretion to manage -- set wages and salaries, hire, fire, supervise, and hand out bonuses. School managers (administrators) are absolutely handcuffed by collective bargaining agreements that restrict how they hire, fire, and promote. You think I'm being hyperbolic? Tell me one other job, apart from a competitive process at a university, that gives people firing-proof "tenure". That's insane.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid. Its exactly what I'd expect if tecahers were underpaid but most switches from other jobs into teaching were from jobs taken as a student pre-qualification for entry-level teaching jobs and most switches out were post-retirement-from teaching “have something productive to do” jobs.

strken 5y ago

Teaching (in Australia, but the pattern in the US is similar although lower[0]) is known to have okay starting pay that doesn't scale with experience. I'd expect some interesting effects around tenure, because those who leave or enter teaching probably do so when they're at the start of their career, when their pay is most competitive. [0] As per https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-australia-it-starts-out-ok-but-goes-downhill-pretty-quickly-122782 https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-..., the US starts out below the bar for tertiary-educated workers and gets even lower

throwaway894345 5y ago
> that doesn't scale with experience Is this true? I have several friends who are teachers in the US and they say they get pay raises for experience and for any extra accreditation they pursue. Which isn’t to remark on whether the pay is satisfactory, but I get the impression that the pay does increase and can do so pretty significantly.
- strken 5y ago
  As per the linked article, it doesn't scale as well as other tertiary-educated workers.

tw04 5y ago

Call me surprised that a foundation that wants to kill public schooling says public school teachers are overpaid. Meanwhile my anecdotal rebuttal is I graduated with 6 folks who went into teaching. All 6 left to do other things and within 5 years were making more than they would have at the end of a 30 year teaching career.

typon 5y ago

Linking a heritage foundation study unironically. Is this the standard of this forum now?

XorNot 5y ago

"I'm going to quit this middle class job and go be a teacher, easy money" said literally no one ever including the OP here. "We just need better teachers" says a group composed of people who are entirely sure the profession is beneath them.