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> Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" There's more to it than money. Public school teaching is currently

by fizzer9 18y ago

> Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" There's more to it than money. Public school teaching is currently a lousy job for a number of reasons: * very large amounts of work to take home * having to deal with complaints from parents and administrators if you raise the rigor of your classes * if you're male, the possibility of losing your career if a female student decides to lie and say you did something wrong * the monotony of only a small portion of your work being actually academic-related. Most of the work is babysitting-style work or else administrative work. For people who like to work with their minds, this is a big deal and a reason against going into teaching. Also, I don't know where you're getting your numbers from. Who (non-teachers) is making these enormous salaries you quote? Those are big numbers.

frig 18y ago
I checked, and I was a bit off on the numbers. My basic assumption is that there's a minimal amount of smarts you'd need to have to be capable of being an effective teacher. I then looked @ people I know who I think have at least that minimal amount of smarts, took their job titles, than was going off of the local salaries for those kinds of jobs. My mistake was comparing local salaries for those kinds of jobs to the nationwide median for k-12 teachers; since "local" for me means "expensive eastern seaboard city", I'm comparing expensive apples to median oranges, and thus I'm a bit off. For reference: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary/by_Years_Experience http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary... That said, I do think people's expectations are off for how much teachers "ought" to be getting paid. We can probably agree that there's some N for which "you probably have to have been in -- or have been capable of being in -- the top N% of your high school class to be capable of being a good teacher". We might not agree on that N -- 5%? 15%? 25%? -- but let's look at what each N means if do a naive mapping to individual income levels: top 5% -> 100k+ top 10% -> ~75k+ top 15% -> ~62.5k+ (I'm ballparking this from the table) etc., via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S... So pick your top N% and pick a salary range and you've got a ballpark range for what it'd take to staff a school with teachers culled from the top N% of achievers (and note that I'm actually lowballing it: the $ for each N is the minimum amount to put you into the top-N%, not the average or median income of the top N% of earners). I'll happily admit that the above is a horribly inaccurate ballpark, but it's a place to start from instead of handwaving as to why teachers are/are not paid that much. As a side note: one of the things that isn't mentioned when looking @ how much school costs in, say, South Korea is that relative salaries are usually higher for teachers than their domestic counterparts, and on top of that due to cultural reasons they're more "respected" by their fellow adults than they are in the USA, which makes it cheaper to attract quality people to be teachers.

by fizzer9 18y ago

frig 18y ago

I checked, and I was a bit off on the numbers. My basic assumption is that there's a minimal amount of smarts you'd need to have to be capable of being an effective teacher. I then looked @ people I know who I think have at least that minimal amount of smarts, took their job titles, than was going off of the local salaries for those kinds of jobs. My mistake was comparing local salaries for those kinds of jobs to the nationwide median for k-12 teachers; since "local" for me means "expensive eastern seaboard city", I'm comparing expensive apples to median oranges, and thus I'm a bit off. For reference: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary/by_Years_Experience http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary... That said, I do think people's expectations are off for how much teachers "ought" to be getting paid. We can probably agree that there's some N for which "you probably have to have been in -- or have been capable of being in -- the top N% of your high school class to be capable of being a good teacher". We might not agree on that N -- 5%? 15%? 25%? -- but let's look at what each N means if do a naive mapping to individual income levels: top 5% -> 100k+ top 10% -> ~75k+ top 15% -> ~62.5k+ (I'm ballparking this from the table) etc., via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S... So pick your top N% and pick a salary range and you've got a ballpark range for what it'd take to staff a school with teachers culled from the top N% of achievers (and note that I'm actually lowballing it: the $ for each N is the minimum amount to put you into the top-N%, not the average or median income of the top N% of earners). I'll happily admit that the above is a horribly inaccurate ballpark, but it's a place to start from instead of handwaving as to why teachers are/are not paid that much. As a side note: one of the things that isn't mentioned when looking @ how much school costs in, say, South Korea is that relative salaries are usually higher for teachers than their domestic counterparts, and on top of that due to cultural reasons they're more "respected" by their fellow adults than they are in the USA, which makes it cheaper to attract quality people to be teachers.