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>>How much do you think they should make? What the market is willing to pay them. I'd rather teach history but I get paid more as a programmer. Let the free

>>How much do you think they should make? What the market is willing to pay them. I'd rather teach history but I get paid more as a programmer. Let the free market decide their pay.

ktizo 14y ago
You do know that a completely free market in education would mean the government getting out of the business of education altogether, including any support for universal education as even just giving vouchers to poor students would violate the principles of a completely free market. Also, given that teachers are a highly desired resource with strong limits on growth, at least in the short term (i.e. it takes ages to properly train a teacher), I suspect that a completely free market would result in lots of tutors for the very rich and a few schools for the wealthy. Which historically seemed to be the general pattern in countries where education was not socialised to some degree.
- don_draper 14y ago
  I don't want a banana republic either. What my beef is with are teachers that make 60K plus, get 3 months off, have more stable job security than the private sector, get to spend time talking about interesting things like world wars in history class or Hemingway in english and then complain that they don't make as much as me, a software developer who spends chunks of my day on mundane tasks such as fixing 'Out of Memory' errors or 'Null Pointer' exceptions'. I do it for the money. They do it for different reasons. Comparing the two is like comparing apples and oranges.
  - ktizo 14y ago
    Whereas, I think they should get more. Much more. I want state schools to have money. I want state teachers to be rich. They are doing a much more useful job than almost any of us here.
  - dalke 14y ago
    What you want is unreasonable, and is counter to the actual research. Quoting from Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, Lawrence Mishel (2008) The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. "...we found that the average weekly pay of teachers in 2003 was nearly 14% below that of workers with similar education and work experience (p. 13), a gap only minimally offset by higher non-wage benefits in teaching. Though teacher earnings have fallen below that of the average college graduate in recent decades, we showed that teachers lost considerable ground during the late 1990s, as earnings of college graduates grew 11% relative to 0.8% growth in teaching." Okay, so you don't want any teacher making 60K plus. Of course, a teacher is often required to have a bachelor's degree and many have graduate degrees. (I see that 60+% of Chicago teachers have at least a master's degree.) The market says (from a 2011 CNN report) "Students who will graduate this spring are receiving job offers with starting salaries averaging $50,034 per year, up 3.5% from last year, according to a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers." On the low end of the listed salaries, "Offers for business administration/management graduates slipped slightly to $44,171." So someone with no work experience but with a college degree can make $44K/year, and you want the upper limit, even after 25 years and for teachers living in an expensive city, to be $60K/year. This is not reasonable. Ahh, but you say that teachers "spend time talking about interesting things", while you don't, and those joys in life should be sufficient compensation for not pulling in the big bucks. The average salary for 'Programmer V', with 8-10 years of experience is $104K. Do you think that being able to talk about Hemingway is worth $40K/year in lost wages? Don't you think that grading papers, and preparing curriculum around standardized tests, and dealing with misbehaving students is the actual comparable to 'Out of Memory' errors? And as for complaining about unstable job security in your field - if you're that jealous of what the teachers have managed, why don't you unionize and advocate for more job security in your own field? Also, you only do programming for the money? Strange. I started programming because it was fun, and only later did I find out that people would pay me a lot of money to do things I found fun. Like tracking down bizarre segmentation errors. I guess I should take a pay cut because I find my work to be interesting.
    - don_draper 14y ago
      >>So someone with no work experience but with a college degree can make $44K/year, and you want the upper limit, even after 25 years and for teachers living in an expensive city, to be $60K/year. This is not reasonable. What? To say that I want them to make no more than 60K shows you're not even reading what I wrote. >> I guess I should take a pay cut because I find my work to be interesting. What again? You clearly don't get that what I'm saying, which is that people in ivory towers should not be making decisions on what people make, the market should.
dalke 14y ago
ktizo's reply is spot on. But since you like the free market so much, isn't unionization part of a free market? Aren't strikes a perfectly valid free market way to achieve the goals of the members of the union? Or is a collection of workers, organized into a union, not part of the same free market as a collection of owners, organized into a company which protects them from personal liability claims? And therefore aren't laws preventing certain labor actions, like Taft–Hartley's prohibitions on certain types of strikes, also a piece of anti-free-market legislation?
- don_draper 14y ago
  I have no problem with organized labor as long as everyone has a free choices. Where things get sticky is when government chooses winners. I disagree with the argument that teachers should get paid as much as software developers because some view them as having more worth to society. The market should decide what someone is worth. The market isn't great and sometimes sucks big timetime, but it beats the ivory tower.
  - ktizo 14y ago
    The market isn't great and sometimes sucks big timetime, but it beats the ivory tower. So what is the middle ground? Or, if we are feeling ambitious, something new that works better?
    - don_draper 14y ago
      Actually I think Obama is in the middle. He's got my vote. Earlier I was playing the devil's advocate a little, downvote me ;)
  - dalke 14y ago
    Ah, but the free market can prevent people from having choices. Suppose a union demands a union shop. That of course prevents workers in the shop from having a choice to not be in the union. Now suppose one person in the shop decides to not be in the union, and the other 150 people in the shop go on strike, to demand that that person be fired. Does the single non-union person have the free choice to work in a shop without being in a union? Do the other 150 people have the free choice to demand, as part of their work contract, a closed shop? Do the union members have the free choice to strike, should a non-union employee be working there? In so-called 'right-to-work' states, the answer is that employees do NOT have the ability to require a union shop, and do NOT have the right to strike in that case. No one in those states has the ability to choose to work in a union shop, or even to buy from a union shop instead of a open shop. Closed shops can appear in a free market. Laws prevent closed shops. The government has "chosen" the winner, and done so in favor of non-union businesses. Are you a big enough fan of the free market that you want to take away existing prohibitions on union power? For the matter, the free market allows child labor. It's those silly labor laws which prevent people from having the choice to send their children to work in the fields and bring in some money. Indeed, anti-truancy laws say that we don't even have the choice of letting the children stay home during the day. Are you a big enough fan of the free market that you want to take away existing prohibitions on child labor?

>>How much do you think they should make? What the market is willing to pay them. I'd rather teach history but I get paid more as a programmer. Let the free market decide their pay.

ktizo 14y ago

You do know that a completely free market in education would mean the government getting out of the business of education altogether, including any support for universal education as even just giving vouchers to poor students would violate the principles of a completely free market. Also, given that teachers are a highly desired resource with strong limits on growth, at least in the short term (i.e. it takes ages to properly train a teacher), I suspect that a completely free market would result in lots of tutors for the very rich and a few schools for the wealthy. Which historically seemed to be the general pattern in countries where education was not socialised to some degree.

don_draper 14y ago
I don't want a banana republic either. What my beef is with are teachers that make 60K plus, get 3 months off, have more stable job security than the private sector, get to spend time talking about interesting things like world wars in history class or Hemingway in english and then complain that they don't make as much as me, a software developer who spends chunks of my day on mundane tasks such as fixing 'Out of Memory' errors or 'Null Pointer' exceptions'. I do it for the money. They do it for different reasons. Comparing the two is like comparing apples and oranges.
- ktizo 14y ago
  Whereas, I think they should get more. Much more. I want state schools to have money. I want state teachers to be rich. They are doing a much more useful job than almost any of us here.
- dalke 14y ago
  What you want is unreasonable, and is counter to the actual research. Quoting from Allegretto, Sylvia A., Sean P. Corcoran, Lawrence Mishel (2008) The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. "...we found that the average weekly pay of teachers in 2003 was nearly 14% below that of workers with similar education and work experience (p. 13), a gap only minimally offset by higher non-wage benefits in teaching. Though teacher earnings have fallen below that of the average college graduate in recent decades, we showed that teachers lost considerable ground during the late 1990s, as earnings of college graduates grew 11% relative to 0.8% growth in teaching." Okay, so you don't want any teacher making 60K plus. Of course, a teacher is often required to have a bachelor's degree and many have graduate degrees. (I see that 60+% of Chicago teachers have at least a master's degree.) The market says (from a 2011 CNN report) "Students who will graduate this spring are receiving job offers with starting salaries averaging $50,034 per year, up 3.5% from last year, according to a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers." On the low end of the listed salaries, "Offers for business administration/management graduates slipped slightly to $44,171." So someone with no work experience but with a college degree can make $44K/year, and you want the upper limit, even after 25 years and for teachers living in an expensive city, to be $60K/year. This is not reasonable. Ahh, but you say that teachers "spend time talking about interesting things", while you don't, and those joys in life should be sufficient compensation for not pulling in the big bucks. The average salary for 'Programmer V', with 8-10 years of experience is $104K. Do you think that being able to talk about Hemingway is worth $40K/year in lost wages? Don't you think that grading papers, and preparing curriculum around standardized tests, and dealing with misbehaving students is the actual comparable to 'Out of Memory' errors? And as for complaining about unstable job security in your field - if you're that jealous of what the teachers have managed, why don't you unionize and advocate for more job security in your own field? Also, you only do programming for the money? Strange. I started programming because it was fun, and only later did I find out that people would pay me a lot of money to do things I found fun. Like tracking down bizarre segmentation errors. I guess I should take a pay cut because I find my work to be interesting.
  - don_draper 14y ago
    >>So someone with no work experience but with a college degree can make $44K/year, and you want the upper limit, even after 25 years and for teachers living in an expensive city, to be $60K/year. This is not reasonable. What? To say that I want them to make no more than 60K shows you're not even reading what I wrote. >> I guess I should take a pay cut because I find my work to be interesting. What again? You clearly don't get that what I'm saying, which is that people in ivory towers should not be making decisions on what people make, the market should.

dalke 14y ago

ktizo's reply is spot on. But since you like the free market so much, isn't unionization part of a free market? Aren't strikes a perfectly valid free market way to achieve the goals of the members of the union? Or is a collection of workers, organized into a union, not part of the same free market as a collection of owners, organized into a company which protects them from personal liability claims? And therefore aren't laws preventing certain labor actions, like Taft–Hartley's prohibitions on certain types of strikes, also a piece of anti-free-market legislation?

don_draper 14y ago
I have no problem with organized labor as long as everyone has a free choices. Where things get sticky is when government chooses winners. I disagree with the argument that teachers should get paid as much as software developers because some view them as having more worth to society. The market should decide what someone is worth. The market isn't great and sometimes sucks big timetime, but it beats the ivory tower.
- ktizo 14y ago
  The market isn't great and sometimes sucks big timetime, but it beats the ivory tower. So what is the middle ground? Or, if we are feeling ambitious, something new that works better?
  - don_draper 14y ago
    Actually I think Obama is in the middle. He's got my vote. Earlier I was playing the devil's advocate a little, downvote me ;)
- dalke 14y ago
  Ah, but the free market can prevent people from having choices. Suppose a union demands a union shop. That of course prevents workers in the shop from having a choice to not be in the union. Now suppose one person in the shop decides to not be in the union, and the other 150 people in the shop go on strike, to demand that that person be fired. Does the single non-union person have the free choice to work in a shop without being in a union? Do the other 150 people have the free choice to demand, as part of their work contract, a closed shop? Do the union members have the free choice to strike, should a non-union employee be working there? In so-called 'right-to-work' states, the answer is that employees do NOT have the ability to require a union shop, and do NOT have the right to strike in that case. No one in those states has the ability to choose to work in a union shop, or even to buy from a union shop instead of a open shop. Closed shops can appear in a free market. Laws prevent closed shops. The government has "chosen" the winner, and done so in favor of non-union businesses. Are you a big enough fan of the free market that you want to take away existing prohibitions on union power? For the matter, the free market allows child labor. It's those silly labor laws which prevent people from having the choice to send their children to work in the fields and bring in some money. Indeed, anti-truancy laws say that we don't even have the choice of letting the children stay home during the day. Are you a big enough fan of the free market that you want to take away existing prohibitions on child labor?