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Study finds 90% of Australian teachers can't afford to live where they teach

158 points by tremon 3y ago

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
Could anyone please explain me why teachers are paid like shit? Not just in Australia, but I mean in general in many other countries. It's not like Australia is a starving banana republic that's short on cash. Do you really value the education of your nation's kids so little? AFAIK in the Nordics like Finland, teachers are paid quite well since the kids are the nation's future workforce so it's worthy investment.
- thebigwinning 3y ago
  High supply of people who want to be teachers and are willing to trade some upside for security and flexibility.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Budgeting derived from available funding. Person in charge of the institutional coffers may well want to pay teachers more, but alas cannot because this is what they're given to play with.
- benji-york 3y ago
  You could ask why the people that clean the toilets are paid so little. It is obvious that what they do is important. Dirty toilets are annoying and potentially a health hazard. The truth is that there are many people who can do the job adequately (as defined by societal consensus), so they are paid relatively little. The same goes for teachers.
- hugh-avherald 3y ago
  (1) There are a lot of teachers (2) They are all basically paid the same (i.e. if you want to pay some teachers more, you have to pay all (in the state) more) So any time there is a proposal to increase pay for teachers, you have to budget a lot of money. It's rare for there to be such an option each budget year.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    in wealthy California, legally mandated education money is relentlessly diverted into obscure and opaque mechanisms, and rarely to teachers. Add multiple layers of political shifting, constant political bickering where promises for benefits much later (retirement) are played at the same time as the first part. Combine with housing policy, lending practices and asset bubbles, and a similar economic result is playing out here, across the entire State.
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  Even tho a lot of people are in absolute denial about it… (evident by those who downvote) In the US, AU, NZ… Unions… despite having money, getting given more money, rarely does that money go to the teachers. The teachers Union doesn’t do a whole lot to help teachers and mostly works against teachers in their own interests. The unions started off great when they were first introduced but now they are pointless and are crippling the education system.
- vasco 3y ago
  Jobs pay as much as it costs to replace you, which is a function of how many people want to do the job and how many people have the skills to do the job. Many people enjoy doing jobs with meaning, many people enjoy working with kids, and many people enjoy teaching things. Teaching is like nursing, many people find meaning in it and want to do it, and the skills required aren't too difficult to get. Just as many people likely want to be doctors or university professors, but less can do it, so pay goes up, comparatively. Or on the other hand, many people can do jobs like working in an oil rig but not many want to. Once you look at jobs like this you understand most of what dictates salaries. Find something hard to do, that not many people want to do, and you'll always be fine. If tomorrow all teachers quit because the pay wouldn't be worth it anymore to counterbalance their love of teaching and the feeling of accomplishment of molding the next generation, pay would go up because kids still need to be taught.
  - h0l0cube 3y ago
    > Jobs pay as much as it costs to replace you It also depends on the minimum competence people will tolerate. There's plenty of competent people who would consider teaching if the compensation was worthwhile. It all depends on how much a country and its voting population care about education and how much more in taxes are they willing to pay to support that.
  - beej71 3y ago
    > Jobs pay as much as it costs to replace you Since there is a teacher shortage (i.e. people are not being replaced), this would appear to not be the case.
    - resonious 3y ago
      If there really is demand for teachers then this shortage will eventually balance out with more expensive education and more teachers. If I'm understanding the argument correctly that is.
      - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
- mnd999 3y ago
  Low taxes get more votes than good schools. Why that is the case I have no idea.
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    Because current parents are a minority and the most reliable turnout is among seniors, at least in the US. Benefits of good school are more long term and people aren't very focused upon that in general. Combine that with distrust that given measures will actually help make better schools. (Just look at the generations long distrust of "New Math", "Common Core", etc.)
- grumpy-de-sre 3y ago
  Low productivity growth. The productivity of the education sector has been unable to keep up with other competing industries in their communities. Unfortunately we see a similar phenomenon for other labor intensive industries (nursing, public transport, etc).
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    That doesn't make sense. If the parents actually get more productive they can afford paying (e.g. through tax) higher teacher salaries.
    - JaimeThompson 3y ago
      >If the parents actually get more productive they can afford paying That assumes that the gains in productivity are passed unto the parents in the form of increased income, do you have any data that shows this to be the case?
      - rightbyte 3y ago
        No. I believe in the last 20-30 years there has been a reallocation of wealth from wage workers to former house owners and stock owners. But some of the parents gotta be either shareholders or cashed out houseowners? I just moved from a city where teacher pay has gotten on par with engineers. The only thing needed was outlawing hiring unqualified teachers. Suddenly there was money for teacher salaries. It didn't solve the housing question for other sectors though ...
        throwaway426079 3y ago
        Were there any requirements at all to get hired as a teacher before that change?
    - grumpy-de-sre 3y ago
      I think in general the costs of low productivity sectors tend to outpace the average which kind of negates additional spending (we see that already, educational spending has grown a lot over the years). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
- jonhohle 3y ago
  IMHO, it’s because teachers take it. In our district, administrative costs have expanded through the roof while teacher pay has stagnated. That increases education costs for the community without that money benefiting teachers directly. What’s worse, IMHO, the teacher unions will then run campaigns for overrides to add additional funding misleading voters into feel good ideas about funding education. When you oppose such an override because the district is a poor steward of public funds you look like you hate the kids or some other BS. I have four kids at our neighborhood school and my wife used to teach in the district (and still subs occasionally). I have a vested interest in ensuring high quality teachers are paid appropriately. But as mentioned, there are so many who have just accepted that it’s a low paying job and martyred themselves for the good of the community. We’re taking advantage of the people responsible for the future of our communities. And by we, I mean sociopathic school boards and district administrations. They’ll spend money on unnecessary technologies at the drop of a hat but teacher pay increases often require a strike. I’ve met more than a few teachers who’ve left to join educational supply companies, school administrations, or even unrelated businesses and not known one who went back into the classroom. One of their first comments when describing their transition is how much better the compensation is.
  - grumpy-de-sre 3y ago
    I always wonder what the breakdown of these administrative costs look like. Is it personnel, is it suppliers fleecing school districts, or is it as simple as everything having got more expensive (eg. building maintenance, janitors, transport etc).
- Mezzie 3y ago
  In librarianship we have the concept of "vocational awe" [0] which also applies to professions such as EMTs, nursing, and teaching. It's a combination of guilt, the idea that bringing money into something 'holy'/moral is crass, and that if you leave you're to blame for the difficulties that your patrons/students/patients experience in the wake of having less access to resources (rather than blaming those who set salaries + staffing levels who are well aware of the correlation between low salaries and poor work conditions and high turnover). [0] = https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-...
  - thebigwinning 3y ago
    This can contribute to being psychologically hard to leave, but doesn't explain why people get into these professions. I agree money is only one form of compensation. Some jobs focus on status or honor. But I don't see that in the areas you mentioned. - nurses do make a lot of money and it's accessible without an incredible academic aptitude - EMT is almost always a stepping stone job for young people - a lot of women and moms want to be librarians partly due to flexibility
    - Mezzie 3y ago
      I mentioned staffing in addition to money because that's how the issue shows up in nursing - nurses are paid a living wage but often expected to deal with horrendous working conditions such as working with far more patients than is safe. > a lot of women and moms want to be librarians partly due to flexibility Source? It's not a particularly flexible job, and in my program none of my peers ever mentioned that being why they were here. The concept of vocational awe also comes out of academic librarianship which is a whole other ball game to public librarianship. But maybe my network + program is an outlier so if you have reading on that I'd welcome it! > EMT is almost always a stepping stone job for young people And? They're still doing valuable, dangerous work and are literally in charge of keeping people alive. They're also paid barely enough to live on, which is batshit crazy if you consider that chronically stressed people (like those who are living poor) make worse decisions and EMTs are required to make very important decisions on the fly. The only reason it's maintainable is that they have new young people to dazzle. > But doesn't explain why people get into these professions. Speaking for librarianship, most people who get into it do so for a few reasons that I've seen(some of them are stupid): * They like reading and want to be around books and just like libraries. This is a very bad reason to become a librarian and go to graduate school. * They want to be an academic but can't hack it in/don't want to try to become a professor. Your odds of landing a library position are much better than getting a decent teaching/research job in much of the humanities. So lots of people with grad degrees in things like English and History who realized that they need a career. (This is also a bad reason.) * They really, really like organizing things. Or are really into niche areas like preservation that can pretty much only be explored professionally in this particular sector. Particularly for people in those interest areas who either have no interest in coding or who went into the profession before there were viable tech career paths to indulge those interests. * They have several years of library work experience and want to move up the ladder because often you can't get even a basic full time job without the grad degree. This is a version of sunk-cost fallacy (as is the 'wants to be an academic' reason); if you've worked in one field/area for a long time it's hard to consider leaving to do something else.
- geomark 3y ago
  Several comments about the budgeting issue in public schools, but what about teacher pay in private schools? Is it higher? Are private school teachers unionized? Because absent institutional constraints teacher pay would be more market based. My anecdotal evidence says the market still doesn't highly value traditional teaching, meaning teaching a class in a traditional school.
- jwie 3y ago
  It really depends on the country, and the particular school district. In the US our problem is cash being syphoned off into "not really education." Around 10-12k worth of education dollars are spent per year per student at a public school in the US. This money does not educate the children, or even go mostly the teachers' salaries. The nations that figured out how to get the cash to the people who matter in education are the ones doing it right. Most western countries spend a lot of cash on education; they just spend it in horrifically bad ways.
tuyguntn 3y ago
Based on my limited knowledge and biases I obtained over time, I am going to blame Wall street and bankers for such issues. We will see more and even worse situation. Why bankers and wall street? Because these guys optimize only for making money, demanding infinite revenues and growth, why? To make couple of people even more rich.
- thebigwinning 3y ago
  Can you explain how these are related at all? It seems you think economics is zero sum, so if that if these guys win, others must be losing.
  - Buttons840 3y ago
    Well, they do seem to be winning, and look no further than this article we're discussing to see people losing.
    - thebigwinning 3y ago
      So how does one cause the other? The banking industry mostly supplies these people with retirement services.
  - tuyguntn 3y ago
    > It seems you think economics is zero sum, so if that if these guys win, others must be losing. Yes, this is my primitive understanding of economics. just like first law of thermodynamics, which states: "energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered in form". I do believe economics is not different. There is a limited set of value in the world created by humans (service, knowledge) and Universe (minerals on Earth, energy coming from Sun and so on). We give price for the value using currency. If currency moves to a limited set of people, it should be taken away from others. When bank hands off mortgage, it expects something in return, which is an interest. To pay interest you need to provide service for someone, more scalable your service is, more you can earn, but not all services are scalable, for example teaching at schools, it doesn't scale, because it has physical constraints, like having a teacher who can engage with kids, whose primary concern is not meeting ends in their private life.
dmurray 3y ago
So there aren't any schools in poor areas? The kids there also commute to posher places for school? That sounds hard to believe to me, but I also can't believe teachers are the lowest-paid workers in the country. This can only make sense with a very broad definition of "can't afford" - Sydney has of course become a very expensive place to live but that's not only a problem for teachers. Add to this that the study quoted was confined to New South Wales but the headline makes a claim about 90% of Australian teachers, and it's clear the article is lying to you.
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  Did you read the article? > The study, published recently in The Australian Educational Researcher analyzed quarterly house sales and rental reports in New South Wales (NSW) and found more than 90% of teaching positions across the state—around 50,000 full-time roles—are located in Local Government Areas (LGAs) where housing is unaffordable on a teacher's salary. Literally second or third paragraph.
  - dmurray 3y ago
    I did read the article. It and you did not answer my questions. I'd like to get a little more context for this cherry picked stat. For example, what percentage of all NSW residents live in these "unaffordable" areas, or what percentage of people are currently paying "unaffordable" amounts for housing. Another methodology issue (not as bad as conflating NSW and Australia) is they look at the median rent for an area, and compare it to a just-graduated teacher's salary. There's nothing wrong with a fresh college grad not being able to afford the 50th percentile house. How about the 80th percentile? When they go on to talk about "senior educators at the top of the pay scale" the number of roles in unaffordable areas appears to drop from 90% to 4%.
    - tuyguntn 3y ago
      current situation in isolation doesn't mean anything for the future. Statistics based on history and current conditions are given to predict the future. Current population of teachers might have bought house long ago or they might have inherited the house. Fact remains, 90% of teachers can't afford buying a house with their current salary and market conditions.
CraigRo 3y ago
Family sized houses often require two incomes (or at least one and a half) to afford. The idea that a single person working 190 or so days per year can get one is a bit deceptive. Teachers can work summers or after school to assignment their incomes
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thriftwy 3y ago
  The idea of teachers working "after school" is awful (see Breaking Bad), but relying in part on your spouse's income is expected.
- red_trumpet 3y ago
  Why do teachers only work 190 days in Australia? Here in Germany it definitely is a full time job if you include preparation of class and corrections.
  - dbetteridge 3y ago
    205 days are spent 'in school' There's 11.5-12 weeks of paid leave, but a chunk of it is spent catching up on paperwork and lesson planning for the next school period. Source: Australian with teachers in the family.
- ShroudedNight 3y ago
  If Australian teachers are like others I've encountered, they're getting paid as though they're required to provide 8 hours of work, when really the requirement is more like 10 or 11.
Buttons840 3y ago
Meaningful work is desirable, people are willing to do meaningful work for less pay, this results in meaningful work being paid less. (This is a existential crisis realization for me.) Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero? Value (as in profit generating value) and meaning are different things. This explains why meaningful work is not necessarily valuable work. But here's the thing, why aren't value and meaning aligned? Don't we want to value and pay for things we find meaningful? This misalignment seems to be an underlying cause of many problems--the root of all evil even.
- gruez 3y ago
  >Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero? If people are willing to do something for free, why should we pay above that? If there aren't enough people willing to do it for free, we can raise the prices we offer until we get enough takers. This is microeconomics 101. The implied problem of "if the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs approach zero, wouldn't there be no one to do it?" doesn't exist, and makes as much sense as "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded!"
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    Yeah. It’s the wrong argument, really. Economics isn’t a charity. You can’t really argue “I deserve to be paid more!” (Unless you’re not into capitalism, which is valid) I think the more valid foundational argument is whether or not the government is incorruptly ensuring the system is functioning equitably. That is: the solution to this perceived problem isn’t to tip the scale. It’s to ensure the scale isn’t being tipped.
    - anothernewdude 3y ago
      Economic concerns are bigger than that. Quality of education is core to a well functioning society. A dollar spend now on education is worth the investment.
gruez 3y ago
>Housing is considered unaffordable if a person spends more than 30% of their income on housing costs—sometimes called being in housing stress. How does this compare to the overall population? This feels like one of those rules of thumb from a bygone era where housing was cheap and affordable, but today is no longer valid. It's obvious that the authors of the article is trying to push the narrative that teachers are underpaid, but using this contrived way of arguing (ie. housing is "unaffordable" for them according to this arbitrary cut-off, therefore they're underpaid) rather than straightforward metrics (eg. "they make x% below people with the same education levels") makes me think they're trying to mislead.
- ospray 3y ago
  Sydney is only beaten by Hong Kong for unaffordable housing. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/10-least-affordable-housing-markets/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/10-least-affordable-housing... So probably the rest of the population can't afford to live there either.
  - draw_down 3y ago
    [dead]
- interactivecode 3y ago
  The problem isn’t that the 30% rule isn’t a good idea anymore. The problem is that for so much of the population it isn’t realistic anymore. Also I wouldn’t be surprised if a terms like housing stress based on the 30% rule is part of official terminology. So it can be used for discussing rental rates, morgage prices and legislation. Looking at averages like you propose isn’t useful if something bad impacts a whole population.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    If teachers are not meaningfully different from the rest of similarly situated citizens, then raising teacher pay alone isn’t the answer. (Maybe building more housing is.)
- 3y ago
jmclnx 3y ago
Australia is doing what the US is doing too ? Nothing like ensuring your next generation grows up stupid :) Now I have my tin-foil-hat on: I almost wonder the top 1%, due to climate change, decided to siphon off even more $ from their government by cutting education to the bone. This extra $ will allow them to create a walled utopia for them when Climate Change destroys most of the earth. But in the past this has been tried many times before, they need workers (slaves) and eventually this utopia will disintegrate. This time rather quickly. They may be able to buy about 10 to 20 years, but their grandchildren will end up living like the rabble. So instead of really solving the problem, the top 1% is doubling down and saying "I will be great, climate change will not impact me, so there".
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  I don’t think there’s much evidence that it’s a conscious conspiracy. Really, it’s just a consequence of every actor in the system behaving according to their script.
- moonchrome 3y ago
  Yes millions of people across multiple countries/continents all secretly colluded to execute this poorly thought out plan that works in a "stars align" scenario. Or you are just using your worldview narratives to explain events that have simpler explanations in line with evidence ?
  - jmclnx 3y ago
    It is a joke, didn't you see the "tin-foil" hat phrase? But there to get people thinking abut the why as opposed to the what.
    - moonchrome 3y ago
      No I get that part, I'm just saying you're clearly projecting your worldviews and trying to make reality fit that narrative rather than the other way around.
  - 3y ago
carrolldunham 3y ago
This article for its own purposes talks about teachers but the main even in the country at the moment is the housing cost crisis currently affecting everyone, whether there is actually some special short changing of teachers I don't know but it is not evidenced by the 'can't afford to live in xyz' illustration, because currently you could write some variation of that about a swath of sectors.
- desmond373 3y ago
  Australian home buyers are suffering from negitive gearing. While there are still tax incentives for hoarding houses, this kinda things gonna keep happening.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
Can Australian teachers be replaced by GPT4 or by a 19-year-old guiding a classroom of students all using GPT4? Probably. The value of a teacher in 2023 is lower than ever in history. To me this article title reads like 90% of Australian chimney sweeps can’t afford to live where they sweep. Classroom teachers have always held a special place in our societies because of 1) the immense value they provide and 2) the human bonds they build with students. It’s been a long time since most teachers were able to build bonds with most students. And soon it’ll be a toss-up whether human classroom teachers provide any value at all. Now 1:1 tutors: that’s a different animal.
- junon 3y ago
  > Can Australian teachers be replaced by GPT4 or by a 19-year-old guiding a classroom of students all using GPT4? No. The answer here is no. Anyone who has used ChatGPT 3, 3.5 or 4 at all to learn a subject can answer that. Unless you're learning the very basics in field X, GPT - as of right now - cannot help you meaningfully and reliably.
- Frost1x 3y ago
  I'm not sure about Australian culture and I think it's a disservice to educators to think GPT can realistically just replace them, but accepting that premise for a moment, in the US, much of the public education system acts as a tax subsidized babysitting service for the labor force. People rely to high degrees that their children are being watched and to some degree taken care of for a large portion of the day by educators while they work. Childcare is absurdly expensive. So while parents have varying degrees of interest in the quality of education their children receive in terms of what public education can and does, the vast majority of people have a high degree of reliance on that public subsidized childcare portion. For some, education is a side effect, for others it's the entire reason (because they can financially support childcare service or private education). In the US, I don't see any LLM replacing that function anytime soon. Could public education reshape to become a better optimized child care service where a future system could substitute the education function need? Perhaps. I'm not entirely sure we should want that as a species but all hail optimal capitalism for our overlords. We're not there yet, however.
swayvil 3y ago
I think that this larger-population kind of conversation format actually inhibits conversation. The conversation is of lower quality. You'd think it would be higher quality, but no. It doesn't seem to work that way. That's something to think about. How can we make the conversation smaller? Or something.
mrangle 3y ago
You can have an international real estate market or widely affordable housing, but not both.
- pauldenton 3y ago
  You can have both, it just requires so much open zoning and building that you can satisfy international and local demand. International real estate can be a boom, if someone in China owns an apartment in Vancouver, everyone else is free riding on their property taxes. They are paying for busses they never use, park maintenance on parks they never visit, fire/police/medical emergency services he never calls. This would be great if Vancouver built enough to let everyone who wants to be there be there
  - RichEO 3y ago
    The end game of an international real estate market like this is empty communities and urban sprawl.
steve_taylor 3y ago
Where's the story here? If you expanded this to all working Australians, you'd still be at about 90%. A long commute is the reality for almost everyone who doesn't work remotely.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  Because the article covers a study that focuses on teachers specifically. I'm sure there are studies that show that other non-remote workers in Australia face similar problems.
  - steve_taylor 3y ago
    A properly scientific study would have sampled the general population to form a baseline.
poof131 3y ago
I believe that the minimum wage should be commensurate with the cost of living in a particular area. Similar to the military's Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) and Subsistence (BAS) which adapt according to one's location, the minimum wage could be adjusted to reflect the price of local housing and groceries within a 30-minute radius. By doing so, the implications of less desirable local policy decisions would be absorbed by the communities that adopt them. At present, there is little motivation for change among those profiting from policies that favor commercial or stagnant development over residential expansion. Such policies often compel people to undertake long commutes or inhabit crowded apartments in order to work locally. If businesses had to raise their prices and consumers had to pay more as a result of these policies, communities might be incentivized to establish policies that enable local living. If the minimum wage was adjusted to reflect local living costs, it could serve as a catalyst for policy change. It would offer a choice: adapt local policies to facilitate affordable living or bear the inconvenience of commuting to other areas for goods and services where wages are in line with living expenses.
roundandround 3y ago
AFAIK New South Wales is only one State in Australia so the headline could be better? But given that public teaching is universal at least in average and bellow areas, doesn't this imply that teachers can only afford to live in ~10% of NSW or are salaries nonuniform such that teachers in an expensive place can afford to live in a place where the local teachers can't afford to live?
- nhinck 3y ago
  Study was based on graduate salaries that are uniform, so most of Sydney would be unaffordable to new teachers. As a new teacher in NSW you often get too much of a say where you'll start teaching as well.
g9yuayon 3y ago
Same for the teachers in the Bay Area? I always think this is a great problem for K-12 education. If a teacher has to spend 2 hours to commute to her school, I can't imagine how the teacher would have enough energy to teach kids well. In a great scheme of things, I wonder if kids in the US succeed despite the failures of the US K-12 education. The sad truth is, the majority of the students, millions of them, do need great teachers to push and nurture them in order to grow to their full potential. I can't imagine how exhausted teachers can ever do so. In contrast, I grew up in China when we had only public education. China did not join the WTO by then, and was quite poor in the current standard. Yet my teachers, for whom I'm forever grateful, painstakingly made sure we understood the fundamentals of science, math, reading, and writing. They designed daily exercises to push our boundaries. They gave timely feedbacks to us (we had at least two 2-hour long exams per subject every week in addition to daily homework, and most of the questions were proof and word problems. Grading them for 50 students in a day or two was not a small feat). I would never push myself as hard as my teachers did, and thanks to them, I could easily thrive in an elite university here and became a TA of CS courses in a sophomore year. I'm sure this is nothing to the elite students here, but I'm not sure if the system of the US can enable the non-elite students like me to achieve such. If anything, I would love to see my tax dollars go to teachers, increasing their salary by at least 2X. Things like ipad in classroom, compute software this and Epic books that, are really not that essential.
dahwolf 3y ago
It's well hidden but the article correctly states that paying teachers more does not solve the problem. In a situation with housing scarcity, paying people more, lending them more, will only inflate prices further. It's a supply problem, and if you think big costly cities will ever add so much supply as to make housing affordable to single income median wages, you're delusional.
aaron695 3y ago
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theropost 3y ago
There are similar situations throughout the developed world at the moment. Here, we have a huge shortage of housing, and rentals. We are trying to bring in labor to help build more units, however, we do not even have units for the additional labor.

158 points by tremon 3y ago

Could anyone please explain me why teachers are paid like shit? Not just in Australia, but I mean in general in many other countries. It's not like Australia is a starving banana republic that's short on cash. Do you really value the education of your nation's kids so little? AFAIK in the Nordics like Finland, teachers are paid quite well since the kids are the nation's future workforce so it's worthy investment.

thebigwinning 3y ago
High supply of people who want to be teachers and are willing to trade some upside for security and flexibility.
- deleted 3y ago
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hammyhavoc 3y ago
Budgeting derived from available funding. Person in charge of the institutional coffers may well want to pay teachers more, but alas cannot because this is what they're given to play with.
benji-york 3y ago
You could ask why the people that clean the toilets are paid so little. It is obvious that what they do is important. Dirty toilets are annoying and potentially a health hazard. The truth is that there are many people who can do the job adequately (as defined by societal consensus), so they are paid relatively little. The same goes for teachers.
hugh-avherald 3y ago
(1) There are a lot of teachers (2) They are all basically paid the same (i.e. if you want to pay some teachers more, you have to pay all (in the state) more) So any time there is a proposal to increase pay for teachers, you have to budget a lot of money. It's rare for there to be such an option each budget year.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  in wealthy California, legally mandated education money is relentlessly diverted into obscure and opaque mechanisms, and rarely to teachers. Add multiple layers of political shifting, constant political bickering where promises for benefits much later (retirement) are played at the same time as the first part. Combine with housing policy, lending practices and asset bubbles, and a similar economic result is playing out here, across the entire State.
throwaway2990 3y ago
Even tho a lot of people are in absolute denial about it… (evident by those who downvote) In the US, AU, NZ… Unions… despite having money, getting given more money, rarely does that money go to the teachers. The teachers Union doesn’t do a whole lot to help teachers and mostly works against teachers in their own interests. The unions started off great when they were first introduced but now they are pointless and are crippling the education system.
vasco 3y ago
Jobs pay as much as it costs to replace you, which is a function of how many people want to do the job and how many people have the skills to do the job. Many people enjoy doing jobs with meaning, many people enjoy working with kids, and many people enjoy teaching things. Teaching is like nursing, many people find meaning in it and want to do it, and the skills required aren't too difficult to get. Just as many people likely want to be doctors or university professors, but less can do it, so pay goes up, comparatively. Or on the other hand, many people can do jobs like working in an oil rig but not many want to. Once you look at jobs like this you understand most of what dictates salaries. Find something hard to do, that not many people want to do, and you'll always be fine. If tomorrow all teachers quit because the pay wouldn't be worth it anymore to counterbalance their love of teaching and the feeling of accomplishment of molding the next generation, pay would go up because kids still need to be taught.
- h0l0cube 3y ago
  > Jobs pay as much as it costs to replace you It also depends on the minimum competence people will tolerate. There's plenty of competent people who would consider teaching if the compensation was worthwhile. It all depends on how much a country and its voting population care about education and how much more in taxes are they willing to pay to support that.
- beej71 3y ago
  > Jobs pay as much as it costs to replace you Since there is a teacher shortage (i.e. people are not being replaced), this would appear to not be the case.
  - resonious 3y ago
    If there really is demand for teachers then this shortage will eventually balance out with more expensive education and more teachers. If I'm understanding the argument correctly that is.
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
mnd999 3y ago
Low taxes get more votes than good schools. Why that is the case I have no idea.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  Because current parents are a minority and the most reliable turnout is among seniors, at least in the US. Benefits of good school are more long term and people aren't very focused upon that in general. Combine that with distrust that given measures will actually help make better schools. (Just look at the generations long distrust of "New Math", "Common Core", etc.)
grumpy-de-sre 3y ago
Low productivity growth. The productivity of the education sector has been unable to keep up with other competing industries in their communities. Unfortunately we see a similar phenomenon for other labor intensive industries (nursing, public transport, etc).
- rightbyte 3y ago
  That doesn't make sense. If the parents actually get more productive they can afford paying (e.g. through tax) higher teacher salaries.
  - JaimeThompson 3y ago
    >If the parents actually get more productive they can afford paying That assumes that the gains in productivity are passed unto the parents in the form of increased income, do you have any data that shows this to be the case?
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      No. I believe in the last 20-30 years there has been a reallocation of wealth from wage workers to former house owners and stock owners. But some of the parents gotta be either shareholders or cashed out houseowners? I just moved from a city where teacher pay has gotten on par with engineers. The only thing needed was outlawing hiring unqualified teachers. Suddenly there was money for teacher salaries. It didn't solve the housing question for other sectors though ...
      - throwaway426079 3y ago
        Were there any requirements at all to get hired as a teacher before that change?
  - grumpy-de-sre 3y ago
    I think in general the costs of low productivity sectors tend to outpace the average which kind of negates additional spending (we see that already, educational spending has grown a lot over the years). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
jonhohle 3y ago
IMHO, it’s because teachers take it. In our district, administrative costs have expanded through the roof while teacher pay has stagnated. That increases education costs for the community without that money benefiting teachers directly. What’s worse, IMHO, the teacher unions will then run campaigns for overrides to add additional funding misleading voters into feel good ideas about funding education. When you oppose such an override because the district is a poor steward of public funds you look like you hate the kids or some other BS. I have four kids at our neighborhood school and my wife used to teach in the district (and still subs occasionally). I have a vested interest in ensuring high quality teachers are paid appropriately. But as mentioned, there are so many who have just accepted that it’s a low paying job and martyred themselves for the good of the community. We’re taking advantage of the people responsible for the future of our communities. And by we, I mean sociopathic school boards and district administrations. They’ll spend money on unnecessary technologies at the drop of a hat but teacher pay increases often require a strike. I’ve met more than a few teachers who’ve left to join educational supply companies, school administrations, or even unrelated businesses and not known one who went back into the classroom. One of their first comments when describing their transition is how much better the compensation is.
- grumpy-de-sre 3y ago
  I always wonder what the breakdown of these administrative costs look like. Is it personnel, is it suppliers fleecing school districts, or is it as simple as everything having got more expensive (eg. building maintenance, janitors, transport etc).
Mezzie 3y ago
In librarianship we have the concept of "vocational awe" [0] which also applies to professions such as EMTs, nursing, and teaching. It's a combination of guilt, the idea that bringing money into something 'holy'/moral is crass, and that if you leave you're to blame for the difficulties that your patrons/students/patients experience in the wake of having less access to resources (rather than blaming those who set salaries + staffing levels who are well aware of the correlation between low salaries and poor work conditions and high turnover). [0] = https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/ https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-...
- thebigwinning 3y ago
  This can contribute to being psychologically hard to leave, but doesn't explain why people get into these professions. I agree money is only one form of compensation. Some jobs focus on status or honor. But I don't see that in the areas you mentioned. - nurses do make a lot of money and it's accessible without an incredible academic aptitude - EMT is almost always a stepping stone job for young people - a lot of women and moms want to be librarians partly due to flexibility
  - Mezzie 3y ago
    I mentioned staffing in addition to money because that's how the issue shows up in nursing - nurses are paid a living wage but often expected to deal with horrendous working conditions such as working with far more patients than is safe. > a lot of women and moms want to be librarians partly due to flexibility Source? It's not a particularly flexible job, and in my program none of my peers ever mentioned that being why they were here. The concept of vocational awe also comes out of academic librarianship which is a whole other ball game to public librarianship. But maybe my network + program is an outlier so if you have reading on that I'd welcome it! > EMT is almost always a stepping stone job for young people And? They're still doing valuable, dangerous work and are literally in charge of keeping people alive. They're also paid barely enough to live on, which is batshit crazy if you consider that chronically stressed people (like those who are living poor) make worse decisions and EMTs are required to make very important decisions on the fly. The only reason it's maintainable is that they have new young people to dazzle. > But doesn't explain why people get into these professions. Speaking for librarianship, most people who get into it do so for a few reasons that I've seen(some of them are stupid): * They like reading and want to be around books and just like libraries. This is a very bad reason to become a librarian and go to graduate school. * They want to be an academic but can't hack it in/don't want to try to become a professor. Your odds of landing a library position are much better than getting a decent teaching/research job in much of the humanities. So lots of people with grad degrees in things like English and History who realized that they need a career. (This is also a bad reason.) * They really, really like organizing things. Or are really into niche areas like preservation that can pretty much only be explored professionally in this particular sector. Particularly for people in those interest areas who either have no interest in coding or who went into the profession before there were viable tech career paths to indulge those interests. * They have several years of library work experience and want to move up the ladder because often you can't get even a basic full time job without the grad degree. This is a version of sunk-cost fallacy (as is the 'wants to be an academic' reason); if you've worked in one field/area for a long time it's hard to consider leaving to do something else.
geomark 3y ago
Several comments about the budgeting issue in public schools, but what about teacher pay in private schools? Is it higher? Are private school teachers unionized? Because absent institutional constraints teacher pay would be more market based. My anecdotal evidence says the market still doesn't highly value traditional teaching, meaning teaching a class in a traditional school.
jwie 3y ago
It really depends on the country, and the particular school district. In the US our problem is cash being syphoned off into "not really education." Around 10-12k worth of education dollars are spent per year per student at a public school in the US. This money does not educate the children, or even go mostly the teachers' salaries. The nations that figured out how to get the cash to the people who matter in education are the ones doing it right. Most western countries spend a lot of cash on education; they just spend it in horrifically bad ways.

tuyguntn 3y ago

Based on my limited knowledge and biases I obtained over time, I am going to blame Wall street and bankers for such issues. We will see more and even worse situation. Why bankers and wall street? Because these guys optimize only for making money, demanding infinite revenues and growth, why? To make couple of people even more rich.

thebigwinning 3y ago
Can you explain how these are related at all? It seems you think economics is zero sum, so if that if these guys win, others must be losing.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  Well, they do seem to be winning, and look no further than this article we're discussing to see people losing.
  - thebigwinning 3y ago
    So how does one cause the other? The banking industry mostly supplies these people with retirement services.
- tuyguntn 3y ago
  > It seems you think economics is zero sum, so if that if these guys win, others must be losing. Yes, this is my primitive understanding of economics. just like first law of thermodynamics, which states: "energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered in form". I do believe economics is not different. There is a limited set of value in the world created by humans (service, knowledge) and Universe (minerals on Earth, energy coming from Sun and so on). We give price for the value using currency. If currency moves to a limited set of people, it should be taken away from others. When bank hands off mortgage, it expects something in return, which is an interest. To pay interest you need to provide service for someone, more scalable your service is, more you can earn, but not all services are scalable, for example teaching at schools, it doesn't scale, because it has physical constraints, like having a teacher who can engage with kids, whose primary concern is not meeting ends in their private life.

dmurray 3y ago

So there aren't any schools in poor areas? The kids there also commute to posher places for school? That sounds hard to believe to me, but I also can't believe teachers are the lowest-paid workers in the country. This can only make sense with a very broad definition of "can't afford" - Sydney has of course become a very expensive place to live but that's not only a problem for teachers. Add to this that the study quoted was confined to New South Wales but the headline makes a claim about 90% of Australian teachers, and it's clear the article is lying to you.

polygamous_bat 3y ago
Did you read the article? > The study, published recently in The Australian Educational Researcher analyzed quarterly house sales and rental reports in New South Wales (NSW) and found more than 90% of teaching positions across the state—around 50,000 full-time roles—are located in Local Government Areas (LGAs) where housing is unaffordable on a teacher's salary. Literally second or third paragraph.
- dmurray 3y ago
  I did read the article. It and you did not answer my questions. I'd like to get a little more context for this cherry picked stat. For example, what percentage of all NSW residents live in these "unaffordable" areas, or what percentage of people are currently paying "unaffordable" amounts for housing. Another methodology issue (not as bad as conflating NSW and Australia) is they look at the median rent for an area, and compare it to a just-graduated teacher's salary. There's nothing wrong with a fresh college grad not being able to afford the 50th percentile house. How about the 80th percentile? When they go on to talk about "senior educators at the top of the pay scale" the number of roles in unaffordable areas appears to drop from 90% to 4%.
  - tuyguntn 3y ago
    current situation in isolation doesn't mean anything for the future. Statistics based on history and current conditions are given to predict the future. Current population of teachers might have bought house long ago or they might have inherited the house. Fact remains, 90% of teachers can't afford buying a house with their current salary and market conditions.

CraigRo 3y ago

Family sized houses often require two incomes (or at least one and a half) to afford. The idea that a single person working 190 or so days per year can get one is a bit deceptive. Teachers can work summers or after school to assignment their incomes

deleted 3y ago
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thriftwy 3y ago
The idea of teachers working "after school" is awful (see Breaking Bad), but relying in part on your spouse's income is expected.
red_trumpet 3y ago
Why do teachers only work 190 days in Australia? Here in Germany it definitely is a full time job if you include preparation of class and corrections.
- dbetteridge 3y ago
  205 days are spent 'in school' There's 11.5-12 weeks of paid leave, but a chunk of it is spent catching up on paperwork and lesson planning for the next school period. Source: Australian with teachers in the family.
ShroudedNight 3y ago
If Australian teachers are like others I've encountered, they're getting paid as though they're required to provide 8 hours of work, when really the requirement is more like 10 or 11.

Buttons840 3y ago

Meaningful work is desirable, people are willing to do meaningful work for less pay, this results in meaningful work being paid less. (This is a existential crisis realization for me.) Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero? Value (as in profit generating value) and meaning are different things. This explains why meaningful work is not necessarily valuable work. But here's the thing, why aren't value and meaning aligned? Don't we want to value and pay for things we find meaningful? This misalignment seems to be an underlying cause of many problems--the root of all evil even.

gruez 3y ago
>Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero? If people are willing to do something for free, why should we pay above that? If there aren't enough people willing to do it for free, we can raise the prices we offer until we get enough takers. This is microeconomics 101. The implied problem of "if the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs approach zero, wouldn't there be no one to do it?" doesn't exist, and makes as much sense as "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded!"
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Yeah. It’s the wrong argument, really. Economics isn’t a charity. You can’t really argue “I deserve to be paid more!” (Unless you’re not into capitalism, which is valid) I think the more valid foundational argument is whether or not the government is incorruptly ensuring the system is functioning equitably. That is: the solution to this perceived problem isn’t to tip the scale. It’s to ensure the scale isn’t being tipped.
  - anothernewdude 3y ago
    Economic concerns are bigger than that. Quality of education is core to a well functioning society. A dollar spend now on education is worth the investment.

gruez 3y ago

>Housing is considered unaffordable if a person spends more than 30% of their income on housing costs—sometimes called being in housing stress. How does this compare to the overall population? This feels like one of those rules of thumb from a bygone era where housing was cheap and affordable, but today is no longer valid. It's obvious that the authors of the article is trying to push the narrative that teachers are underpaid, but using this contrived way of arguing (ie. housing is "unaffordable" for them according to this arbitrary cut-off, therefore they're underpaid) rather than straightforward metrics (eg. "they make x% below people with the same education levels") makes me think they're trying to mislead.

ospray 3y ago
Sydney is only beaten by Hong Kong for unaffordable housing. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/10-least-affordable-housing-markets/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/10-least-affordable-housing... So probably the rest of the population can't afford to live there either.
- draw_down 3y ago
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interactivecode 3y ago
The problem isn’t that the 30% rule isn’t a good idea anymore. The problem is that for so much of the population it isn’t realistic anymore. Also I wouldn’t be surprised if a terms like housing stress based on the 30% rule is part of official terminology. So it can be used for discussing rental rates, morgage prices and legislation. Looking at averages like you propose isn’t useful if something bad impacts a whole population.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  If teachers are not meaningfully different from the rest of similarly situated citizens, then raising teacher pay alone isn’t the answer. (Maybe building more housing is.)
3y ago

jmclnx 3y ago

Australia is doing what the US is doing too ? Nothing like ensuring your next generation grows up stupid :) Now I have my tin-foil-hat on: I almost wonder the top 1%, due to climate change, decided to siphon off even more $ from their government by cutting education to the bone. This extra $ will allow them to create a walled utopia for them when Climate Change destroys most of the earth. But in the past this has been tried many times before, they need workers (slaves) and eventually this utopia will disintegrate. This time rather quickly. They may be able to buy about 10 to 20 years, but their grandchildren will end up living like the rabble. So instead of really solving the problem, the top 1% is doubling down and saying "I will be great, climate change will not impact me, so there".

Waterluvian 3y ago
I don’t think there’s much evidence that it’s a conscious conspiracy. Really, it’s just a consequence of every actor in the system behaving according to their script.
moonchrome 3y ago
Yes millions of people across multiple countries/continents all secretly colluded to execute this poorly thought out plan that works in a "stars align" scenario. Or you are just using your worldview narratives to explain events that have simpler explanations in line with evidence ?
- jmclnx 3y ago
  It is a joke, didn't you see the "tin-foil" hat phrase? But there to get people thinking abut the why as opposed to the what.
  - moonchrome 3y ago
    No I get that part, I'm just saying you're clearly projecting your worldviews and trying to make reality fit that narrative rather than the other way around.
- 3y ago

carrolldunham 3y ago

This article for its own purposes talks about teachers but the main even in the country at the moment is the housing cost crisis currently affecting everyone, whether there is actually some special short changing of teachers I don't know but it is not evidenced by the 'can't afford to live in xyz' illustration, because currently you could write some variation of that about a swath of sectors.

desmond373 3y ago
Australian home buyers are suffering from negitive gearing. While there are still tax incentives for hoarding houses, this kinda things gonna keep happening.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

Can Australian teachers be replaced by GPT4 or by a 19-year-old guiding a classroom of students all using GPT4? Probably. The value of a teacher in 2023 is lower than ever in history. To me this article title reads like 90% of Australian chimney sweeps can’t afford to live where they sweep. Classroom teachers have always held a special place in our societies because of 1) the immense value they provide and 2) the human bonds they build with students. It’s been a long time since most teachers were able to build bonds with most students. And soon it’ll be a toss-up whether human classroom teachers provide any value at all. Now 1:1 tutors: that’s a different animal.

junon 3y ago
> Can Australian teachers be replaced by GPT4 or by a 19-year-old guiding a classroom of students all using GPT4? No. The answer here is no. Anyone who has used ChatGPT 3, 3.5 or 4 at all to learn a subject can answer that. Unless you're learning the very basics in field X, GPT - as of right now - cannot help you meaningfully and reliably.
Frost1x 3y ago
I'm not sure about Australian culture and I think it's a disservice to educators to think GPT can realistically just replace them, but accepting that premise for a moment, in the US, much of the public education system acts as a tax subsidized babysitting service for the labor force. People rely to high degrees that their children are being watched and to some degree taken care of for a large portion of the day by educators while they work. Childcare is absurdly expensive. So while parents have varying degrees of interest in the quality of education their children receive in terms of what public education can and does, the vast majority of people have a high degree of reliance on that public subsidized childcare portion. For some, education is a side effect, for others it's the entire reason (because they can financially support childcare service or private education). In the US, I don't see any LLM replacing that function anytime soon. Could public education reshape to become a better optimized child care service where a future system could substitute the education function need? Perhaps. I'm not entirely sure we should want that as a species but all hail optimal capitalism for our overlords. We're not there yet, however.

swayvil 3y ago

I think that this larger-population kind of conversation format actually inhibits conversation. The conversation is of lower quality. You'd think it would be higher quality, but no. It doesn't seem to work that way. That's something to think about. How can we make the conversation smaller? Or something.

mrangle 3y ago

You can have an international real estate market or widely affordable housing, but not both.

pauldenton 3y ago
You can have both, it just requires so much open zoning and building that you can satisfy international and local demand. International real estate can be a boom, if someone in China owns an apartment in Vancouver, everyone else is free riding on their property taxes. They are paying for busses they never use, park maintenance on parks they never visit, fire/police/medical emergency services he never calls. This would be great if Vancouver built enough to let everyone who wants to be there be there
- RichEO 3y ago
  The end game of an international real estate market like this is empty communities and urban sprawl.

steve_taylor 3y ago

Where's the story here? If you expanded this to all working Australians, you'd still be at about 90%. A long commute is the reality for almost everyone who doesn't work remotely.

wildrhythms 3y ago
Because the article covers a study that focuses on teachers specifically. I'm sure there are studies that show that other non-remote workers in Australia face similar problems.
- steve_taylor 3y ago
  A properly scientific study would have sampled the general population to form a baseline.

poof131 3y ago

I believe that the minimum wage should be commensurate with the cost of living in a particular area. Similar to the military's Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) and Subsistence (BAS) which adapt according to one's location, the minimum wage could be adjusted to reflect the price of local housing and groceries within a 30-minute radius. By doing so, the implications of less desirable local policy decisions would be absorbed by the communities that adopt them. At present, there is little motivation for change among those profiting from policies that favor commercial or stagnant development over residential expansion. Such policies often compel people to undertake long commutes or inhabit crowded apartments in order to work locally. If businesses had to raise their prices and consumers had to pay more as a result of these policies, communities might be incentivized to establish policies that enable local living. If the minimum wage was adjusted to reflect local living costs, it could serve as a catalyst for policy change. It would offer a choice: adapt local policies to facilitate affordable living or bear the inconvenience of commuting to other areas for goods and services where wages are in line with living expenses.

roundandround 3y ago

AFAIK New South Wales is only one State in Australia so the headline could be better? But given that public teaching is universal at least in average and bellow areas, doesn't this imply that teachers can only afford to live in ~10% of NSW or are salaries nonuniform such that teachers in an expensive place can afford to live in a place where the local teachers can't afford to live?

nhinck 3y ago
Study was based on graduate salaries that are uniform, so most of Sydney would be unaffordable to new teachers. As a new teacher in NSW you often get too much of a say where you'll start teaching as well.

g9yuayon 3y ago

Same for the teachers in the Bay Area? I always think this is a great problem for K-12 education. If a teacher has to spend 2 hours to commute to her school, I can't imagine how the teacher would have enough energy to teach kids well. In a great scheme of things, I wonder if kids in the US succeed despite the failures of the US K-12 education. The sad truth is, the majority of the students, millions of them, do need great teachers to push and nurture them in order to grow to their full potential. I can't imagine how exhausted teachers can ever do so. In contrast, I grew up in China when we had only public education. China did not join the WTO by then, and was quite poor in the current standard. Yet my teachers, for whom I'm forever grateful, painstakingly made sure we understood the fundamentals of science, math, reading, and writing. They designed daily exercises to push our boundaries. They gave timely feedbacks to us (we had at least two 2-hour long exams per subject every week in addition to daily homework, and most of the questions were proof and word problems. Grading them for 50 students in a day or two was not a small feat). I would never push myself as hard as my teachers did, and thanks to them, I could easily thrive in an elite university here and became a TA of CS courses in a sophomore year. I'm sure this is nothing to the elite students here, but I'm not sure if the system of the US can enable the non-elite students like me to achieve such. If anything, I would love to see my tax dollars go to teachers, increasing their salary by at least 2X. Things like ipad in classroom, compute software this and Epic books that, are really not that essential.

dahwolf 3y ago

It's well hidden but the article correctly states that paying teachers more does not solve the problem. In a situation with housing scarcity, paying people more, lending them more, will only inflate prices further. It's a supply problem, and if you think big costly cities will ever add so much supply as to make housing affordable to single income median wages, you're delusional.

aaron695 3y ago

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theropost 3y ago

There are similar situations throughout the developed world at the moment. Here, we have a huge shortage of housing, and rentals. We are trying to bring in labor to help build more units, however, we do not even have units for the additional labor.