7 ms·

Teacher Pay and per Student Spending

33 points by gmays 2y ago

snapplebobapple 2y ago
guys, high teacher salary is a failure measure, not a success measure. It means your district failed to contain costs (obviously this needs to be benchmarked against normalized student performance, but even in that form higher pay is a failure measure).
droopyEyelids 2y ago
Id like to see a comparison between unionized and non-union teachers. My hunch would be that some unions did well and others didnt, but it would still be difficult to understand the data without comparing to the tax base regions for the school.
- yanslookup 2y ago
  They have that comparison in the compensation view. Unionized teachers make a lot more money.
  - legitster 2y ago
    They actually don't state this directly - it's states with collective bargaining vs. no collective bargaining. You can be a unionized teacher in a state without bargaining rights.
    - verall 2y ago
      Which just muddies the waters because if collective bargaining is banned then the unions are toothless. The correct comparison is collective bargaining legal vs illegal.
      - panzagl 2y ago
        In my state the "teacher's union" is basically liability insurance for stuff that happens in the classroom, they have no real collective bargaining power.
- Amorymeltzer 2y ago
  >Teachers earn 26% more on average in states with collective bargaining
IncreasePosts 2y ago
Well, these numbers certainly don't seem like teachers are being drastically underpaid like I commonly hear. Per wikipedia[1], 73% of individuals in America earn income less than the average teacher salary of $69k. These numbers are just averages though - are long-time teachers dominating the pay scale and new teachers are getting paid a pittance?
- bitshiftfaced 2y ago
  Not to mention, most Americans work 245 days a year, but teachers 181 days a year.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  > Teachers make on average 5% less than 10 years ago, and 9% less than the peak in 2009-10, adjusted for inflation.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Yes, that sucks, but regardless with the numbers as presented, it is hard to say teachers are scandalously underpaid.
    - zie 2y ago
      I highly encourage you to go do the job and see if you still think that's true. :)
      - snapplebobapple 2y ago
        Why do so many people continuously make this mistake? How hard a job allegedly is is irrelevant. What matters is how hard it is to fill the positions. Given that we can require so many to hve masters and doctorates and still get average salary where it is tells you its easy to fill, therefore these guys are overpaid, if it was hard to fill we would hace a higher percentage as just bachelors and comp would be higher.
gnicholas 2y ago
I’d love to see more linkage between teacher pay and student success. Unfortunately there aren’t any public schools in my area that factor performance into pay, presumably because the unions are very strong here (CA). Instead, we have a mix of teachers, including some who throw things and yell at students, but can’t be fired.
- jayd16 2y ago
  It would be a perverse incentive to get struggling kids out of your class and off your record. Same flawed logic behind No Child Left Behind. Underfunding problem areas is not a recipe for success.
  - gnicholas 2y ago
    Sure, you’d want to use students’ incoming skills and trajectory to make sure you’re not penalizing teachers who have lots of low-performing kids.
    - permo-w 2y ago
      that doesn't solve the stated problem
      - gnicholas 2y ago
        There isn’t an incentive to get rid of a student who is low-performing if that aspect is taken into account when calculating the teachers’ impact on student success.
        permo-w 2y ago
        a student who is low-performing is not necessarily a student whose grades are low. they could also be a student who struggles to improve. and let's not forget the other perverse incentive here: if growth is all that's taken into account what happens to the students whose grades are already good?
forrestthewoods 2y ago
Teacher pay discussions are woefully incomplete if they don’t include pension contribution. In tech we talk about “total compensation” as opposed to “salary”. The same should be true for other jobs as well. Especially those with a defined benefits pension plan!
- rconti 2y ago
  If someone has a defined benefit, they still pay into it. That's not to say defined benefit programs aren't a great deal for the employee -- they are, and most of us would love to have one. It's just to point out that you can't factor in pension payouts as 'free money' because it's more akin to an outsized market return or something. Basically, you'd need to figure out the excess ROI based on what they get out vs what they put in, relative to the market (or something).
  - justin66 2y ago
    > That's not to say defined benefit programs aren't a great deal for the employee -- they are, and most of us would love to have one. I would much prefer a big SEP-IRA, or a 401k with a company match beyond the standard safe harbor 4% or whatever it is. Government defined benefit pensions come with their own problems. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40538070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40538070
- vundercind 2y ago
  These are very insecure in a lot of states. Even the ones with stable teacher retirement systems are under constant threat of having those systems destabilized by the political winds.
- zie 2y ago
  While I agree Total Compensation should be what is talked about, in general pension plans for government employees is self-funded by them. Some states are as high as 10-15% of your salary going into your pension and the employer picking up the same or higher rate. Pennsylvania for instance has an employer contribution rate of 34.94% plus an employee rate of around 7.56%. - https://www.psers.pa.gov/About/PFR/Documents/ECR%20fact%20sheet%20FINAL.pdf https://www.psers.pa.gov/About/PFR/Documents/ECR%20fact%20sh... Arizona is at 12.29% each for employee and employer for a combined rate of almost 25%. https://www.azasrs.gov/content/contribution-rates https://www.azasrs.gov/content/contribution-rates
datavirtue 2y ago
Are the rankings COL adjusted? Having trouble reconciling the $25k difference between Ohio and New York lifting New York to #1.
legitster 2y ago
One thing this report fails to include is the total compensation package of teachers. It varies state to state and district to district, but in general teachers get very good healthcare plans and a pension. When I compared notes with my teacher friend, I found that his benefits package would be worth about $15k a year (assuming the pension plan is well run). And let's not forget they only work 180 days a year. While inflation has not been kind to their salary gains, it has been very kind to the pension gains. So the total compensation package has probably not changed much.
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  > And let's not forget they only work 180 days a year. That's just for the academic year. Then they work during the summer in preparation for the next school year, teaching summer school, attending their own continuing education courses or graduate courses, or working a second job to make enough money to make ends meet. And most professionals do work more, but not hugely more. I'm in a middling org and get 50 days off a year between holidays, PTO, and sick leave (not always used, rolls over though). If I used all my sick leave I'd only work 210 days, just 30 more days than a teacher who manages to take the entire summer off. At a middling org.
  - legitster 2y ago
    At our district summer prep is maximum of two weeks. Which is made up by the two weeks of paid leave most districts are required to give out a year - so it still ends up as 180 days. Most summer prep is done by admins who are employed 11 months a year, and teachers get paid extra if they choose to teach summer school.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      Summer classroom days are not the only summer prep. Lots of teachers also work summer jobs so they can be not-poor. Super common. (“But their wages aren’t actually that bad” 1 - in many places, yes, they are, and 2 - add a couple kids and a divorce and it’s extremely bad) It’s also why so many end up doing MLMs.
Spinnaker_ 2y ago
Everyone is focused on teacher salary, but the national average expenditure per student was $16,281. In New York it was $30,876. This seems insane. A handful of student's expenditure covers a teacher's salary. Where does the expenditure for the other 25 kids in the class go?
- zie 2y ago
  School districts spend most of their money on humans. There is a LOT of infrastructure. The schools have to be built, they have to be staffed(there is a fair bit of support staff, to keep the teachers in classrooms teaching). From cafeteria workers and janitors to IT people and payroll, back office and grant people. High Schools might have a few thousand students that congregate there every single day, that's a small town. Our local high school's have a dedicated full-time HVAC person for instance, just to keep the insane temperatures outside from getting into the classrooms.
- legitster 2y ago
  I was able to find a breakdown from a few years ago per student: https://www.nycenet.edu/offices/d_chanc_oper/budget/dbor/sber/FY2018/FY2018_Default.aspx https://www.nycenet.edu/offices/d_chanc_oper/budget/dbor/sbe...
  - peterfirefly 2y ago
    It doesn't say how much is for normal instruction of normal kids, how much is zoo keeping of unruly kids, how much is remedial teaching of the slow kids (or sometimes the ones who had other reasons for being behind), how much is AP teaching (or better) for the smart kids. It just says: Pct of Per Pct of Public Student Total Exp. School Amount i. Teachers $10,124,379 32.1% 37.7% $9,914 (Edit: fix tab to space conversion/layout)
- vundercind 2y ago
  1) buildings, air conditioning, buses and bus drivers, lunches, “resource officers”, the second(!) assistant superintendent’s second(!) secretary (true story, not a big district either) et c. 2) Some kids with certain needs require one entire staff member with them at all times. There may be a few of these in a given school. 3) Somewhat more require something like 1/5-1/10 of one or (more often) two staff members’ time (think “special ed” rooms) 4) These figures may include serious outliers. Selective public schools often have very high per-pupil spending, and schools attached to correctional institutions sometimes register six figures of spending per student, to pick a couple examples. TL;DR if we could suss out what’s actually spent on a “normal” student at a “normal” school, it would be way lower.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
justin66 2y ago
It's tempting to view defined benefit plans as something very valuable, but they are not an unalloyed good for whoever receives them. It's common for participation in such a plan to require a teacher (or firefighter, policeman, etc.) to forgo collecting some, or all, of the social security benefits they would otherwise be eligible for thanks to provisions in federal law like Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO). Rolling these back to some extent (the argument is that they were well intentioned, but went too far) is the subject of active political lobbying, and has been for some time. [0] [1] There are a few particularly broken things about the current system. A worker's potential ineligibility to receive their spouse's social security survivor's benefits is a big one. It is not uncommon for the WEP to kick in and prevent a person with a defined benefit pension from receiving any of their spouse's survivor benefits, whereas if they had never worked a day in their life, they would receive it. [0] https://www.aft.org/news/educators-fight-keep-their-social-security-benefits https://www.aft.org/news/educators-fight-keep-their-social-s... [1] https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/how-wep-provision-hacks-educators-retirement https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/how-w...
- gnicholas 2y ago
  They also don’t pay into social security. For someone of my age (early 40s), this is a plus because it’s unlikely I’ll ever be able to receive payments from the system (and certainly not at the levels that people currently pull out, due to means-based limitations that will need to be put in place). I’d much rather be paying into a separate system.
  - justin66 2y ago
    > They also don’t pay into social security. That's not really the area of friction. The problem is that very few people pay only into a defined benefit plan in their lifetime. The point of contention is the calculations involved when a person has paid into both social security and defined benefit plans. (or how much of the survivor benefit a spouse should receive)
- votepaunchy 2y ago

33 points by gmays 2y ago

guys, high teacher salary is a failure measure, not a success measure. It means your district failed to contain costs (obviously this needs to be benchmarked against normalized student performance, but even in that form higher pay is a failure measure).

droopyEyelids 2y ago

Id like to see a comparison between unionized and non-union teachers. My hunch would be that some unions did well and others didnt, but it would still be difficult to understand the data without comparing to the tax base regions for the school.

yanslookup 2y ago
They have that comparison in the compensation view. Unionized teachers make a lot more money.
- legitster 2y ago
  They actually don't state this directly - it's states with collective bargaining vs. no collective bargaining. You can be a unionized teacher in a state without bargaining rights.
  - verall 2y ago
    Which just muddies the waters because if collective bargaining is banned then the unions are toothless. The correct comparison is collective bargaining legal vs illegal.
    - panzagl 2y ago
      In my state the "teacher's union" is basically liability insurance for stuff that happens in the classroom, they have no real collective bargaining power.
Amorymeltzer 2y ago
>Teachers earn 26% more on average in states with collective bargaining

IncreasePosts 2y ago

Well, these numbers certainly don't seem like teachers are being drastically underpaid like I commonly hear. Per wikipedia[1], 73% of individuals in America earn income less than the average teacher salary of $69k. These numbers are just averages though - are long-time teachers dominating the pay scale and new teachers are getting paid a pittance?

bitshiftfaced 2y ago
Not to mention, most Americans work 245 days a year, but teachers 181 days a year.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
> Teachers make on average 5% less than 10 years ago, and 9% less than the peak in 2009-10, adjusted for inflation.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Yes, that sucks, but regardless with the numbers as presented, it is hard to say teachers are scandalously underpaid.
  - zie 2y ago
    I highly encourage you to go do the job and see if you still think that's true. :)
    - snapplebobapple 2y ago
      Why do so many people continuously make this mistake? How hard a job allegedly is is irrelevant. What matters is how hard it is to fill the positions. Given that we can require so many to hve masters and doctorates and still get average salary where it is tells you its easy to fill, therefore these guys are overpaid, if it was hard to fill we would hace a higher percentage as just bachelors and comp would be higher.

gnicholas 2y ago

I’d love to see more linkage between teacher pay and student success. Unfortunately there aren’t any public schools in my area that factor performance into pay, presumably because the unions are very strong here (CA). Instead, we have a mix of teachers, including some who throw things and yell at students, but can’t be fired.

jayd16 2y ago
It would be a perverse incentive to get struggling kids out of your class and off your record. Same flawed logic behind No Child Left Behind. Underfunding problem areas is not a recipe for success.
- gnicholas 2y ago
  Sure, you’d want to use students’ incoming skills and trajectory to make sure you’re not penalizing teachers who have lots of low-performing kids.
  - permo-w 2y ago
    that doesn't solve the stated problem
    - gnicholas 2y ago
      There isn’t an incentive to get rid of a student who is low-performing if that aspect is taken into account when calculating the teachers’ impact on student success.
      - permo-w 2y ago
        a student who is low-performing is not necessarily a student whose grades are low. they could also be a student who struggles to improve. and let's not forget the other perverse incentive here: if growth is all that's taken into account what happens to the students whose grades are already good?

forrestthewoods 2y ago

Teacher pay discussions are woefully incomplete if they don’t include pension contribution. In tech we talk about “total compensation” as opposed to “salary”. The same should be true for other jobs as well. Especially those with a defined benefits pension plan!

rconti 2y ago
If someone has a defined benefit, they still pay into it. That's not to say defined benefit programs aren't a great deal for the employee -- they are, and most of us would love to have one. It's just to point out that you can't factor in pension payouts as 'free money' because it's more akin to an outsized market return or something. Basically, you'd need to figure out the excess ROI based on what they get out vs what they put in, relative to the market (or something).
- justin66 2y ago
  > That's not to say defined benefit programs aren't a great deal for the employee -- they are, and most of us would love to have one. I would much prefer a big SEP-IRA, or a 401k with a company match beyond the standard safe harbor 4% or whatever it is. Government defined benefit pensions come with their own problems. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40538070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40538070
vundercind 2y ago
These are very insecure in a lot of states. Even the ones with stable teacher retirement systems are under constant threat of having those systems destabilized by the political winds.
zie 2y ago
While I agree Total Compensation should be what is talked about, in general pension plans for government employees is self-funded by them. Some states are as high as 10-15% of your salary going into your pension and the employer picking up the same or higher rate. Pennsylvania for instance has an employer contribution rate of 34.94% plus an employee rate of around 7.56%. - https://www.psers.pa.gov/About/PFR/Documents/ECR%20fact%20sheet%20FINAL.pdf https://www.psers.pa.gov/About/PFR/Documents/ECR%20fact%20sh... Arizona is at 12.29% each for employee and employer for a combined rate of almost 25%. https://www.azasrs.gov/content/contribution-rates https://www.azasrs.gov/content/contribution-rates

datavirtue 2y ago

Are the rankings COL adjusted? Having trouble reconciling the $25k difference between Ohio and New York lifting New York to #1.

legitster 2y ago

One thing this report fails to include is the total compensation package of teachers. It varies state to state and district to district, but in general teachers get very good healthcare plans and a pension. When I compared notes with my teacher friend, I found that his benefits package would be worth about $15k a year (assuming the pension plan is well run). And let's not forget they only work 180 days a year. While inflation has not been kind to their salary gains, it has been very kind to the pension gains. So the total compensation package has probably not changed much.

Jtsummers 2y ago
> And let's not forget they only work 180 days a year. That's just for the academic year. Then they work during the summer in preparation for the next school year, teaching summer school, attending their own continuing education courses or graduate courses, or working a second job to make enough money to make ends meet. And most professionals do work more, but not hugely more. I'm in a middling org and get 50 days off a year between holidays, PTO, and sick leave (not always used, rolls over though). If I used all my sick leave I'd only work 210 days, just 30 more days than a teacher who manages to take the entire summer off. At a middling org.
- legitster 2y ago
  At our district summer prep is maximum of two weeks. Which is made up by the two weeks of paid leave most districts are required to give out a year - so it still ends up as 180 days. Most summer prep is done by admins who are employed 11 months a year, and teachers get paid extra if they choose to teach summer school.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Summer classroom days are not the only summer prep. Lots of teachers also work summer jobs so they can be not-poor. Super common. (“But their wages aren’t actually that bad” 1 - in many places, yes, they are, and 2 - add a couple kids and a divorce and it’s extremely bad) It’s also why so many end up doing MLMs.

Spinnaker_ 2y ago

Everyone is focused on teacher salary, but the national average expenditure per student was $16,281. In New York it was $30,876. This seems insane. A handful of student's expenditure covers a teacher's salary. Where does the expenditure for the other 25 kids in the class go?

zie 2y ago
School districts spend most of their money on humans. There is a LOT of infrastructure. The schools have to be built, they have to be staffed(there is a fair bit of support staff, to keep the teachers in classrooms teaching). From cafeteria workers and janitors to IT people and payroll, back office and grant people. High Schools might have a few thousand students that congregate there every single day, that's a small town. Our local high school's have a dedicated full-time HVAC person for instance, just to keep the insane temperatures outside from getting into the classrooms.
legitster 2y ago
I was able to find a breakdown from a few years ago per student: https://www.nycenet.edu/offices/d_chanc_oper/budget/dbor/sber/FY2018/FY2018_Default.aspx https://www.nycenet.edu/offices/d_chanc_oper/budget/dbor/sbe...
- peterfirefly 2y ago
  It doesn't say how much is for normal instruction of normal kids, how much is zoo keeping of unruly kids, how much is remedial teaching of the slow kids (or sometimes the ones who had other reasons for being behind), how much is AP teaching (or better) for the smart kids. It just says: Pct of Per Pct of Public Student Total Exp. School Amount i. Teachers $10,124,379 32.1% 37.7% $9,914 (Edit: fix tab to space conversion/layout)
vundercind 2y ago
1) buildings, air conditioning, buses and bus drivers, lunches, “resource officers”, the second(!) assistant superintendent’s second(!) secretary (true story, not a big district either) et c. 2) Some kids with certain needs require one entire staff member with them at all times. There may be a few of these in a given school. 3) Somewhat more require something like 1/5-1/10 of one or (more often) two staff members’ time (think “special ed” rooms) 4) These figures may include serious outliers. Selective public schools often have very high per-pupil spending, and schools attached to correctional institutions sometimes register six figures of spending per student, to pick a couple examples. TL;DR if we could suss out what’s actually spent on a “normal” student at a “normal” school, it would be way lower.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

justin66 2y ago

It's tempting to view defined benefit plans as something very valuable, but they are not an unalloyed good for whoever receives them. It's common for participation in such a plan to require a teacher (or firefighter, policeman, etc.) to forgo collecting some, or all, of the social security benefits they would otherwise be eligible for thanks to provisions in federal law like Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO). Rolling these back to some extent (the argument is that they were well intentioned, but went too far) is the subject of active political lobbying, and has been for some time. [0] [1] There are a few particularly broken things about the current system. A worker's potential ineligibility to receive their spouse's social security survivor's benefits is a big one. It is not uncommon for the WEP to kick in and prevent a person with a defined benefit pension from receiving any of their spouse's survivor benefits, whereas if they had never worked a day in their life, they would receive it. [0] https://www.aft.org/news/educators-fight-keep-their-social-security-benefits https://www.aft.org/news/educators-fight-keep-their-social-s... [1] https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/how-wep-provision-hacks-educators-retirement https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/how-w...

gnicholas 2y ago
They also don’t pay into social security. For someone of my age (early 40s), this is a plus because it’s unlikely I’ll ever be able to receive payments from the system (and certainly not at the levels that people currently pull out, due to means-based limitations that will need to be put in place). I’d much rather be paying into a separate system.
- justin66 2y ago
  > They also don’t pay into social security. That's not really the area of friction. The problem is that very few people pay only into a defined benefit plan in their lifetime. The point of contention is the calculations involved when a person has paid into both social security and defined benefit plans. (or how much of the survivor benefit a spouse should receive)
votepaunchy 2y ago