7 ms·

I might get hammered for this, but I really don't think teachers are significantly underpaid. I say this as someone married to a teacher. Considering that they

I might get hammered for this, but I really don't think teachers are significantly underpaid. I say this as someone married to a teacher. Considering that they only work 9 months a year and generally have good benefits, I'm not convinced they should be getting paid significantly more. Take an average salary of around 30-35k and /.75 (9 of 12 months) and it becomes $40,000 - $46,667 a year. Add into that good retirement and great healthcare, it just doesn't seem that unreasonable to me. It's unreasonable to compare a salary from a job working 9 months a year to another profession that works 12 months a year. "Well it's hard, if you had to deal with these kids you'd need a few months off too." Yeah, and that's why I didn't become a teacher. You chose this knowing all the pros and cons. Pro - only work 9 months a year Con - only get paid for 9 months a year

lkbm 13y ago
> Yeah, and that's why I didn't become a teacher. You chose this knowing all the pros and cons. Exactly. And if we want better teachers, we need to boost the pros or reduce the cons so it's a better option. Cashing it out in terms of what we've decided they "deserve" may be gratifying, but it's useless. Let's base our policy based on what will actually best achieve our goals.
sillysaurus 13y ago
Our teachers are our kids' jailers. Spending more for better jailers would probably have a decent impact on the future.
byoung2 13y ago
How many hours are spent outside of class preparing lessons, grading papers, staff meetings, parent conferences, etc.? This reduces the hourly rate somewhat.
- rayiner 13y ago
  The amount of class time per week in our county is ~30. So even if they spend 15 hours a week outside of class on those things, that's a 45 hour work week, very consistent with that of other white collar workers making that kind of money. Teachers get paid extremely well in most larger cities. In Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and New York, starting salaries are in the $40-45k/year range with a bachelors. This might seem low to people on this board accustomed to Silicon Valley pay scales, but it's substantially above average for liberal arts majors. When I graduated college in Atlanta in 2007, the going rate for a fresh BA in white collar professional job (say in the accounting department of a company) was $35k. Teachers were starting at $40k+. Also, the benefits cannot be ignored. Good health insurance and a pension contribution are extravagant benefits for young college graduates in the Millennial generation. They easily add $15-20k/year to total compensation.
  - jacalata 13y ago
    so the starting salary is decent - where does it top out for our new grad accountant, and for our new teacher? Also, many teachers are not liberal arts majors; I have several teacher friends who are math/science majors with an M.Ed or whatever it is - and a couple programmer friends who are ex-teacher math majors, and the career switch was certainly influenced by the option to easily double their income.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      In most places, teachers will top out at $70-80k if they stay teachers and don't move into administration, which is consistent with what that accounting grad would make in the payroll or HR department of a company. Note that at that point, the benefits become even more significant. Teachers often have healthcare plans that cover their family members, where they pay a lower portion of premiums, etc. They get large pension contributions and often get healthcare benefits in retirement, which is rare in the private sector. Math/pure science majors aren't worth anything. There is a huge oversupply of people with say biology or chemistry degrees. In the private sector, a biology major is lucky to start at $35k/year. Obviously you can dramatically increase your salary by acquiring programming skills and going into software development, but that's not unique to teachers. Programmers make way more than pretty much every other field you'd find yourself in after getting a non-engineering bachelors degree, except maybe economics.
      - dylangs1030 13y ago
        rayiner, how is it consistent with the rest of what you're saying that math/science degrees are worthless? Understand, I acknowledge you might have more knowledge/experience on this, I'm just skeptical. I would think - and the tone of your argument seems to posit - that it matters more what you decide to do with that degree than what degree you have. Is it really worthless to have a good math degree if you become a quant? I understand market oversaturation, but that could be said of almost every degree, moreso liberal arts.
        13y ago
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  The average teacher works 38.5 hours/week during weeks when they work full time. They do, however, spend about 40% of their working hours at a location other than work. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
earh 13y ago
Even assuming that it was possible to figure out how much someone "deserves".... Don't forget that teachers don't get a bathroom break except before/after the day and lunch, and they are constantly "on" performing in front of a potentially hostile audience of people who are aren't paid to be there and forbidden from leaving, and who sometimes turn violent, they are salary-exempt not hourly (they have to grade papers and such at home), and they generally require a specialized undergrad or masters degree, and continuing education.
auctiontheory 13y ago
Maybe it depends where you live. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, teachers do not make a middle-class wage, by any reasonable definition of "middle class." Is that what we want? Your second paragraph seems to make some kind of fairness or economic efficiency argument about teachers. Why not ask a question about society? If the best people (for the most part) weigh the pros and cons and decide they want to own a home and have two kids, and therefore choose a non-teaching career, is that best for society?
- harryh 13y ago
  A high school teacher in SF can expect to make 58k a year(1). Median household income in SF 71k a year(2). Now that's 13k lower but that's only one salary when many household's have two and, as the top commenter says, 9 months instead of 12. Plenty of teachers pick up some extra cash over the summer. Sounds pretty middle class to me. 1. http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-High-School-Teacher-l-San-Francisco,-CA.html http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-High-School-Teacher-l-San-Fra... 2. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty.htm http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty....
  - auctiontheory 13y ago
    My guess is that you don't live in SF. ONE-bedroom apartments are renting for $2500 and up. (Multiply that by 12.) Very average places, not luxury apartments. And that rent may not include a $200-300 parking spot. My definition of "middle-class" includes being able to buy a house and have two kids. You'd have a hard time doing that in SF on 58K, even given your assumptions about a spouse and summer cash. http://www.zillow.com/local-info/CA-San-Francisco-home-value/r_20330/ http://www.zillow.com/local-info/CA-San-Francisco-home-value... And in the end, society loses.
    - harryh 13y ago
      My definition of middle class is those people making around the median (or middle) wage. Yours is interesting too though!
    - 13y ago
georgemcbay 13y ago
My issue as it relates to compensation in general has less to do with whether any group of people is underpaid or overpaid as a whole and more to do with how entire job categories tend to have their salaries defined in fairly tight ranges (that do alternate based on regional cost of living, but not so much based on individual value) that are virtually impossible to break out of (unless you play the lottery ticket of starting your own company). Sports athletes are one of the few areas in which people can do basically the same "job" and one guy is paid $20 million a year and another guy is paid $200k a year. You don't have that sort of variability based on actual value produced in many traditional jobs, which I think is a shame. Are some teachers in the US actually overpaid relative to the long-term value they produce in their role? Surely, even if their base pay is bad I'm sure some of them don't even actually earn what they make. But are some teachers incredibly underpaid? Surely, as well. However, for the vast majority of "traditional" jobs we've created these compensation structures where you can nudge people up or down relative to their peers, but not by nearly enough to adjust for their true value.
nostrademons 13y ago
Does your spouse have homework? My mother was a teacher. Her time in the classroom was nominally from about 8:00 - 2:30. Her time actually at work was from about 8:00 - 4:30, because there would be students with after-school activities that needed supervision, or staff meetings, or parent/teacher conferences, or putting away classroom activites, etc. Her time away from home, including commuting, would be about 7:30 - 5:30. Her time actually working or commuting to work would be 7:30 - 5:30 + 8:00 - 10:00, because she'd frequently have to spend another couple hours grading papers, or writing up feedback, or planning the next lesson. She would often end up going back to school up to a month before the kids came back, too, to research and plan lessons. I think the "teachers don't work all that much" meme gets confused by equating time in classroom with work. If you're doing it right, teaching involves a lot more than just delivering instruction to kids. It requires that you really understand each of your students (which could be 20 in elementary schools, but up to 100 in high schools), and where they're at, and that you understand your subject enough to bridge the gap between student and subject. That takes a lot of time, probably more than most industries. Of course, this all gets confused because there are many, many teachers who don't put in that effort and just deliver a pre-canned lesson plan to 20 bored minds every day. They get up, talk, and go home. Those are the teachers that made my childhood hell. The unfortunate part is that the way economic incentives are set up, there is no reason for a teacher to act like the first description, and every reason for them to act like the second. Anyone who's willing to actually understand the job they're tasked with doing will put that effort into a more lucrative job (well, except for a few poor schmucks for whom teaching is a calling). So you do, in a sense, get what you pay for.
- rayiner 13y ago
  So in debates about teacher pay, remember that the teachers' unions are fighting as hard as they can to make sure that people like your mom get paid exactly the same as the slackers who deliver pre-canned lessons to 20 bored minds every day. And based on my personal experience with K-8 in the U.S., there are a lot more of the latter than the former.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
ecopoesis 13y ago
40-50k a year is well under a poverty income in most urban areas in the US. What we pay teachers is abysmal, and the not surprising result is that many of our teachers are also abysmal.
- mjmahone17 13y ago
  No it isn't, at least not officially. Poverty is defined as $23,050 total yearly income for a family of four. So even assuming a teacher is the sole earner in their family, if they're making 40k, they're not in poverty. Unable to afford all the nice things the HN crowd loves to talk about? Maybe. But still, if you have a two-teacher family earning 80k/year, they're in the 53rd percentile of US income, according to http://www.whatsmypercent.com/ http://www.whatsmypercent.com/
- rayiner 13y ago
  What the hell are you on? $35k is a very good starting salary in most urban areas in the U.S. that aren't NYC or SF. $45,000 in Chicago (a city with average CoL as far as urban areas in the U.S. go) is about $2,700 per month take home. A decent 1BR runs about $750 in a decent neighborhood. You can live very comfortably for that much. And people do--that's a very typical income for a college graduate professional in the city.
  - ecopoesis 13y ago
    Lving in Boston has distorted my reality. Here, decent 1 BRs cost $1500 a month. http://www.wbur.org/2013/01/30/boston-apartments-heat-map http://www.wbur.org/2013/01/30/boston-apartments-heat-map

lkbm 13y ago

> Yeah, and that's why I didn't become a teacher. You chose this knowing all the pros and cons. Exactly. And if we want better teachers, we need to boost the pros or reduce the cons so it's a better option. Cashing it out in terms of what we've decided they "deserve" may be gratifying, but it's useless. Let's base our policy based on what will actually best achieve our goals.

sillysaurus 13y ago

Our teachers are our kids' jailers. Spending more for better jailers would probably have a decent impact on the future.

byoung2 13y ago

How many hours are spent outside of class preparing lessons, grading papers, staff meetings, parent conferences, etc.? This reduces the hourly rate somewhat.

rayiner 13y ago
The amount of class time per week in our county is ~30. So even if they spend 15 hours a week outside of class on those things, that's a 45 hour work week, very consistent with that of other white collar workers making that kind of money. Teachers get paid extremely well in most larger cities. In Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, and New York, starting salaries are in the $40-45k/year range with a bachelors. This might seem low to people on this board accustomed to Silicon Valley pay scales, but it's substantially above average for liberal arts majors. When I graduated college in Atlanta in 2007, the going rate for a fresh BA in white collar professional job (say in the accounting department of a company) was $35k. Teachers were starting at $40k+. Also, the benefits cannot be ignored. Good health insurance and a pension contribution are extravagant benefits for young college graduates in the Millennial generation. They easily add $15-20k/year to total compensation.
- jacalata 13y ago
  so the starting salary is decent - where does it top out for our new grad accountant, and for our new teacher? Also, many teachers are not liberal arts majors; I have several teacher friends who are math/science majors with an M.Ed or whatever it is - and a couple programmer friends who are ex-teacher math majors, and the career switch was certainly influenced by the option to easily double their income.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    In most places, teachers will top out at $70-80k if they stay teachers and don't move into administration, which is consistent with what that accounting grad would make in the payroll or HR department of a company. Note that at that point, the benefits become even more significant. Teachers often have healthcare plans that cover their family members, where they pay a lower portion of premiums, etc. They get large pension contributions and often get healthcare benefits in retirement, which is rare in the private sector. Math/pure science majors aren't worth anything. There is a huge oversupply of people with say biology or chemistry degrees. In the private sector, a biology major is lucky to start at $35k/year. Obviously you can dramatically increase your salary by acquiring programming skills and going into software development, but that's not unique to teachers. Programmers make way more than pretty much every other field you'd find yourself in after getting a non-engineering bachelors degree, except maybe economics.
    - dylangs1030 13y ago
      rayiner, how is it consistent with the rest of what you're saying that math/science degrees are worthless? Understand, I acknowledge you might have more knowledge/experience on this, I'm just skeptical. I would think - and the tone of your argument seems to posit - that it matters more what you decide to do with that degree than what degree you have. Is it really worthless to have a good math degree if you become a quant? I understand market oversaturation, but that could be said of almost every degree, moreso liberal arts.
      - 13y ago
yummyfajitas 13y ago
The average teacher works 38.5 hours/week during weeks when they work full time. They do, however, spend about 40% of their working hours at a location other than work. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

earh 13y ago

Even assuming that it was possible to figure out how much someone "deserves".... Don't forget that teachers don't get a bathroom break except before/after the day and lunch, and they are constantly "on" performing in front of a potentially hostile audience of people who are aren't paid to be there and forbidden from leaving, and who sometimes turn violent, they are salary-exempt not hourly (they have to grade papers and such at home), and they generally require a specialized undergrad or masters degree, and continuing education.

auctiontheory 13y ago

Maybe it depends where you live. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, teachers do not make a middle-class wage, by any reasonable definition of "middle class." Is that what we want? Your second paragraph seems to make some kind of fairness or economic efficiency argument about teachers. Why not ask a question about society? If the best people (for the most part) weigh the pros and cons and decide they want to own a home and have two kids, and therefore choose a non-teaching career, is that best for society?

harryh 13y ago
A high school teacher in SF can expect to make 58k a year(1). Median household income in SF 71k a year(2). Now that's 13k lower but that's only one salary when many household's have two and, as the top commenter says, 9 months instead of 12. Plenty of teachers pick up some extra cash over the summer. Sounds pretty middle class to me. 1. http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-High-School-Teacher-l-San-Francisco,-CA.html http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-High-School-Teacher-l-San-Fra... 2. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty.htm http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty....
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  My guess is that you don't live in SF. ONE-bedroom apartments are renting for $2500 and up. (Multiply that by 12.) Very average places, not luxury apartments. And that rent may not include a $200-300 parking spot. My definition of "middle-class" includes being able to buy a house and have two kids. You'd have a hard time doing that in SF on 58K, even given your assumptions about a spouse and summer cash. http://www.zillow.com/local-info/CA-San-Francisco-home-value/r_20330/ http://www.zillow.com/local-info/CA-San-Francisco-home-value... And in the end, society loses.
  - harryh 13y ago
    My definition of middle class is those people making around the median (or middle) wage. Yours is interesting too though!
  - 13y ago

georgemcbay 13y ago

My issue as it relates to compensation in general has less to do with whether any group of people is underpaid or overpaid as a whole and more to do with how entire job categories tend to have their salaries defined in fairly tight ranges (that do alternate based on regional cost of living, but not so much based on individual value) that are virtually impossible to break out of (unless you play the lottery ticket of starting your own company). Sports athletes are one of the few areas in which people can do basically the same "job" and one guy is paid $20 million a year and another guy is paid $200k a year. You don't have that sort of variability based on actual value produced in many traditional jobs, which I think is a shame. Are some teachers in the US actually overpaid relative to the long-term value they produce in their role? Surely, even if their base pay is bad I'm sure some of them don't even actually earn what they make. But are some teachers incredibly underpaid? Surely, as well. However, for the vast majority of "traditional" jobs we've created these compensation structures where you can nudge people up or down relative to their peers, but not by nearly enough to adjust for their true value.

nostrademons 13y ago

Does your spouse have homework? My mother was a teacher. Her time in the classroom was nominally from about 8:00 - 2:30. Her time actually at work was from about 8:00 - 4:30, because there would be students with after-school activities that needed supervision, or staff meetings, or parent/teacher conferences, or putting away classroom activites, etc. Her time away from home, including commuting, would be about 7:30 - 5:30. Her time actually working or commuting to work would be 7:30 - 5:30 + 8:00 - 10:00, because she'd frequently have to spend another couple hours grading papers, or writing up feedback, or planning the next lesson. She would often end up going back to school up to a month before the kids came back, too, to research and plan lessons. I think the "teachers don't work all that much" meme gets confused by equating time in classroom with work. If you're doing it right, teaching involves a lot more than just delivering instruction to kids. It requires that you really understand each of your students (which could be 20 in elementary schools, but up to 100 in high schools), and where they're at, and that you understand your subject enough to bridge the gap between student and subject. That takes a lot of time, probably more than most industries. Of course, this all gets confused because there are many, many teachers who don't put in that effort and just deliver a pre-canned lesson plan to 20 bored minds every day. They get up, talk, and go home. Those are the teachers that made my childhood hell. The unfortunate part is that the way economic incentives are set up, there is no reason for a teacher to act like the first description, and every reason for them to act like the second. Anyone who's willing to actually understand the job they're tasked with doing will put that effort into a more lucrative job (well, except for a few poor schmucks for whom teaching is a calling). So you do, in a sense, get what you pay for.

rayiner 13y ago
So in debates about teacher pay, remember that the teachers' unions are fighting as hard as they can to make sure that people like your mom get paid exactly the same as the slackers who deliver pre-canned lessons to 20 bored minds every day. And based on my personal experience with K-8 in the U.S., there are a lot more of the latter than the former.
- nostrademons 13y ago

ecopoesis 13y ago

40-50k a year is well under a poverty income in most urban areas in the US. What we pay teachers is abysmal, and the not surprising result is that many of our teachers are also abysmal.

mjmahone17 13y ago
No it isn't, at least not officially. Poverty is defined as $23,050 total yearly income for a family of four. So even assuming a teacher is the sole earner in their family, if they're making 40k, they're not in poverty. Unable to afford all the nice things the HN crowd loves to talk about? Maybe. But still, if you have a two-teacher family earning 80k/year, they're in the 53rd percentile of US income, according to http://www.whatsmypercent.com/ http://www.whatsmypercent.com/
rayiner 13y ago
What the hell are you on? $35k is a very good starting salary in most urban areas in the U.S. that aren't NYC or SF. $45,000 in Chicago (a city with average CoL as far as urban areas in the U.S. go) is about $2,700 per month take home. A decent 1BR runs about $750 in a decent neighborhood. You can live very comfortably for that much. And people do--that's a very typical income for a college graduate professional in the city.
- ecopoesis 13y ago
  Lving in Boston has distorted my reality. Here, decent 1 BRs cost $1500 a month. http://www.wbur.org/2013/01/30/boston-apartments-heat-map http://www.wbur.org/2013/01/30/boston-apartments-heat-map