5 ms·

Here are teacher's salaries in CA. https://calsalaries.com/job/teacher-salary https://calsalaries.com/job/teacher-salary Average $97K. I searched for an elem

by yumraj 5y ago

Here are teacher's salaries in CA. https://calsalaries.com/job/teacher-salary https://calsalaries.com/job/teacher-salary Average $97K. I searched for an elementary school teacher, 1st Grade, in San Jose area to see a salary of $142.5K in 2019. Another teacher, 2nd Grade, had a salary of $141.6K in 2019. To be honest, these don't seem too low to me. Edit: Look at some of the salaries on the main page, $230K-$420K - I wonder who these teachers are in Elementary and High schools with such high salaries.. Edit2: Please note I'm not a teacher, nor do I have any family members who are teachers. I'm merely pointing to the data since I too was curious about it. I have no way of verifying that the data presented by that website is accurate.

vikingcaffiene 5y ago
I live in Cali. My wife was a teacher. Her salary was nowhere near 97k.
tarr11 5y ago
97k will qualify you for low income housing in San Jose. https://www.sanjoseca.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/72973/637568410954100000 https://www.sanjoseca.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/72973/6...
- yumraj 5y ago
  97K is for the whole state. I don't know what the average salaries for San Jose are.. I just looked at two salaries, of 1st Grade and 2nd Grade teachers in San Jose and they were ~$142K which is not bad at all.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > I don't know what the average salaries for San Jose are.. From a source that, unlike yours, isn't completely opaque and unreliable, $92,500 for the highest paid segment (Secondary) of K-12 non-special ed teachers, $101,500 for secondary special ed, the absolutely highest of any K-12 category. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41940.htm#25-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41940.htm#25-0000
moeris 5y ago
I was a teacher in the Midwest before moving into programming. My salary was $28k. I worked in a larger city for a couple years and was making $35k for a while. In order to afford student loan payments and rent, I worked three jobs. Still missed meals and was late in payments regularly. The cities your mentioning are very high COL areas, and relatively affluent. Competition for those teaching positions is going to be very intense, and mostly go to senior teachers with at least 5-10 years experience. It's not representative of the nation.
- dnissley 5y ago
  Having lived in Indiana for most of my life, and knowing folks who are teachers there still, I can vouch for the first statement. Not so much the second though -- yes, these high salaries are in HCOL areas, but I'm not aware of crazy amount of competition to be a teacher even with those salaries. I'm now in Chicago, where teachers fresh out of college fetch about $60k in my district, and there's always plenty of openings.
  - moeris 5y ago
    It's definitely different depending on the state. In part because some states issue more teaching certificates per year. Michigan is one of those. At the time I was teaching, in around 2017, I had a friend get a job in Novi (Metro Detroit). The competition was pretty intense. See for example, [this posting](https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/novi-community-schools-received-952-applicants-for-one-teaching-job https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/novi-community-s...) which had over 900 applicants. It took me over a year after graduation to get a job, and I had applied to over 130 postings. I ended up finally getting a job in an inner city school. The situation could very well have been very different in Chicago, though, depending on a lot of factors.
rrss 5y ago
that site seems use the word "salary" to refer to total compensation - the second highest (shown as a salary $315k) actually has a salary of $89k. I assume the values for the San Jose teachers are also total compensation, not salary.
dragonwriter 5y ago
Methodology here is opaque but clearly not systematic. (Also, it is mixing colleges and possibly other things with K-12, which is obvious from the detail lists.) For more reliable data, go to the BLS, which is systematic. In CA: Elementary teachers (except special ed), mean $85,100. Kindergarten teachers (exc. special ed) $76,450. Middle school teachers (exc. special ed and career/technical) $81,490. Secondary school teachers (exc. special ed and career/technical) $86,900. (And special ed and career/technical are lower in each category.) https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_ca.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_ca.htm > Edit: Look at some of the salaries on the main page, $230K-$420K - I wonder who these teachers are in Elementary and High schools with such high salaries.. Probably bad data handling; since its deanonymized, its probably based on public employer data sets, which are often released in unstructured form and potentially listing different pay for the same employee separately; to try to deal with this, sometimes people merge records by name. Sometimes this is right. Sometimes this merges duplicated data or data for distinct but same first and last named individuals (being a CA public employee and having had family members who were, I’ve seen media (one step removed from the public release) data sets where my or other family members’ data was wrong or duplicated, and derived data sets where those errors were compounded.
deleted 5y ago
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idiotsecant 5y ago
the majority of this teachers live in the most populated parts of California, which are also the most expensive. You also happen to have cherry picked the state with the best teacher pay in the nation, as mediocre as that is for such a high cost of living state. If you repeat your analysis in, for example, South Dakota, you'll find that the median teacher there is paid about $48k. That's not that far from the statutorily required minimum wage in San Jose.

by yumraj 5y ago

vikingcaffiene 5y ago

I live in Cali. My wife was a teacher. Her salary was nowhere near 97k.

tarr11 5y ago

97k will qualify you for low income housing in San Jose. https://www.sanjoseca.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/72973/637568410954100000 https://www.sanjoseca.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/72973/6...

yumraj 5y ago
97K is for the whole state. I don't know what the average salaries for San Jose are.. I just looked at two salaries, of 1st Grade and 2nd Grade teachers in San Jose and they were ~$142K which is not bad at all.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I don't know what the average salaries for San Jose are.. From a source that, unlike yours, isn't completely opaque and unreliable, $92,500 for the highest paid segment (Secondary) of K-12 non-special ed teachers, $101,500 for secondary special ed, the absolutely highest of any K-12 category. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41940.htm#25-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41940.htm#25-0000

moeris 5y ago

I was a teacher in the Midwest before moving into programming. My salary was $28k. I worked in a larger city for a couple years and was making $35k for a while. In order to afford student loan payments and rent, I worked three jobs. Still missed meals and was late in payments regularly. The cities your mentioning are very high COL areas, and relatively affluent. Competition for those teaching positions is going to be very intense, and mostly go to senior teachers with at least 5-10 years experience. It's not representative of the nation.

dnissley 5y ago
Having lived in Indiana for most of my life, and knowing folks who are teachers there still, I can vouch for the first statement. Not so much the second though -- yes, these high salaries are in HCOL areas, but I'm not aware of crazy amount of competition to be a teacher even with those salaries. I'm now in Chicago, where teachers fresh out of college fetch about $60k in my district, and there's always plenty of openings.
- moeris 5y ago
  It's definitely different depending on the state. In part because some states issue more teaching certificates per year. Michigan is one of those. At the time I was teaching, in around 2017, I had a friend get a job in Novi (Metro Detroit). The competition was pretty intense. See for example, [this posting](https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/novi-community-schools-received-952-applicants-for-one-teaching-job https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/novi-community-s...) which had over 900 applicants. It took me over a year after graduation to get a job, and I had applied to over 130 postings. I ended up finally getting a job in an inner city school. The situation could very well have been very different in Chicago, though, depending on a lot of factors.

rrss 5y ago

that site seems use the word "salary" to refer to total compensation - the second highest (shown as a salary $315k) actually has a salary of $89k. I assume the values for the San Jose teachers are also total compensation, not salary.

dragonwriter 5y ago

Methodology here is opaque but clearly not systematic. (Also, it is mixing colleges and possibly other things with K-12, which is obvious from the detail lists.) For more reliable data, go to the BLS, which is systematic. In CA: Elementary teachers (except special ed), mean $85,100. Kindergarten teachers (exc. special ed) $76,450. Middle school teachers (exc. special ed and career/technical) $81,490. Secondary school teachers (exc. special ed and career/technical) $86,900. (And special ed and career/technical are lower in each category.) https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_ca.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_ca.htm > Edit: Look at some of the salaries on the main page, $230K-$420K - I wonder who these teachers are in Elementary and High schools with such high salaries.. Probably bad data handling; since its deanonymized, its probably based on public employer data sets, which are often released in unstructured form and potentially listing different pay for the same employee separately; to try to deal with this, sometimes people merge records by name. Sometimes this is right. Sometimes this merges duplicated data or data for distinct but same first and last named individuals (being a CA public employee and having had family members who were, I’ve seen media (one step removed from the public release) data sets where my or other family members’ data was wrong or duplicated, and derived data sets where those errors were compounded.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

idiotsecant 5y ago

the majority of this teachers live in the most populated parts of California, which are also the most expensive. You also happen to have cherry picked the state with the best teacher pay in the nation, as mediocre as that is for such a high cost of living state. If you repeat your analysis in, for example, South Dakota, you'll find that the median teacher there is paid about $48k. That's not that far from the statutorily required minimum wage in San Jose.