Just finished my grad school paper concerning teachers strikes and this was a central point.
Just wanted to get some input from the dopers concerning whether teachers as a profession, are adequately compensated. The sentiment shared by a significant number of educators is that society undervalues what they do and that the low salary is a depressing reflection of this.
Any thoughts/opinions on this matter will be read with great interest.
This question is tailor-made for Great Debates. I’ll move the thread over there for you.
But yes, I think they are.
Peace,
mangeorge
Yes underpaid
Yes, we should get rid of all administrators (and especially the school board:)) and pay the teachers more.
Actually, I’d like to see the end of the teachers’ unions and the whole “tenure” mess. Then we could pay teachers based on merit, not seniority. Right now, you can’t reward the good teachers without pouring billions more into all of their salaries (multiple any pay increase by 5 million teachers).
Basing pay on performance would decrease the teaching supply (no longer as easy a buck for those who don’t really love teaching) and probably increase the average salary as well as the quality of teaching.
Great idea! Teachers are seriously underpaid! We should certainly pay them more, and performace is a better yardstick than seniority.
So, … … who decides on the rubric with which to measure teacher performance?
:sound of crickets chirping:
That is the problem.
This post was moved from GenQues to Great Debates. Hey, DavidB, get in here and chuck this sucker over to Pointless Wastes of Time Because There Is No Way in Hell Anyone Will Ever Answer This One.
Who should we let rank teachers?
Student’s test scores? Doesn’t sound like a good idea - teachers will simply teach to the test.
Other teachers? No good. There were never any other teaches in my classroom - how the hell would they know how I’m doing?
Parents? <snicker> Not likely. Fact of life - parents hate teachers.
Supervisors/administrators/school officials? That’s essentially how the system works now.
Ain’t no good answer. So, Miss Grundy will always be underpaid.
That’s why I quit. 
Schools may be public, but in many ways they are like corporations. Local residents serve as “shareholders” who ensure that the school is making a good return on investment. If not, they either agitate for change or vote with their feet.
Principals and administrators should run the show, observing teachers and rewarding excellent workers (or replacing those who aren’t worth their salary). Right now, it is hard to hold administrators accountable for the quality of schools (relative to their funding) because they can point a finger at the union. Remove the whole concept of tenure and suddenly everybody has a lot more responsibility.
Adjusting salaries to match performance should dramatically improve a school’s quality-of-teaching/expense ratio. At that point, it is up to the community to fund higher salaries if they want better teaching. Of course, they will compare the school to others by word of mouth and reports and determine whether the requests are justified. If not, a change in leadership may be required.
Hmm, unless you live in Connecticut, yes. 
Seriously though, there is quite a range of salaries, I think it depends a lot on what state you are in. http://www.aft.org/research/reports/salarysv/ss97/tables/i-1.html
Of course they are not paid enough, and that is a problem. More than one of my bright college student friends have said “I want to teach, but why should I when I can major in computer scence and be garanteed a decent well paying job.”
There is also a major flaw to the “performance based” pay theory. Let’s face it, the teacher that teaches honors classes in a rich community is going to end up with better test scores (or whatever) than the one in a poorer community. That is due to any number of factors, most importantly parents involvement in their childrens lives and education. In other words, teachers in rich communities will get paid more. of course the best teachers will follow the money and the poor neighborhoods will get the worst and least experienced teachers. Are rich children really entitled to a better education? I think not. The whole pay for performance thing was invented by people with little understanding of education and lots of understanding about what makes a good political soundbite.
And no, a school is not akin to a corporation that has to please it’s “customers”. A (public) school is an institution run by the government for the education of our people and a certain amount of cultural conditioning. We cannot say that schools are there to please the parents. I am sure that some parents think that Hitler was a great guy. They probably want that to be thaught in schools. But we don’t do that…for a good reason.
The solution? I think we need to institute military recruitment tactics toward teaching. We have to offer incentives for people to go to college to become teachers. We should focus on teaching as an oppertunity for the poor. This would provide a chance at college and a better llife for some people, and presumably they would henceforth value education, and they would pass that on to their children, so instead of slum bait they’d grow up to be productive people.
Reading over this thread I have some.
I would appreciate some help understanding the answers to these questions.
peace
answering a few of the questions:
I assume you refer to the practice of teaching * to * the test…
Well, it’s not bad if you see teaching as the act of getting others to perform specific actions in response to specific stimuli.
If however, you see teaching as equipping others with the skills they will need to become better thinkers, then there is a real problem with using material not developed by the teacher his or her self to evaluate that teacher’s effectiveness (or by extension, what the student has learned).
From the point of view of what is best for the students, and assuming that the teacher is one we would call a “good teacher,” would you rather the students be tested on material the teacher is presenting, or would you rather it be some material a buearocrat feels the teacher should be presenting?
The order of instruction should always be: present material THEN develop the examination based on what was presented. It should never go: develop exam, then attempt to devise a curriculum to meet the exam.
Parent’s don’t hate teachers, they don’t understand what it is that teachers do. Parents of the general population view teachers as people who took their jobs because the couldn’t get a real job and wanted summers off. The truth is, good teachers work and train year round. Also, parents have the same feelings about teachers that they had in school: They view grades as given by the teacher, not earned by the student. They project this on to their children: “You cannot fail my child!” rather than “What does my child need to do to succeed.” Again, it’s a lack of understanding about what teaching is, and what school is all about, not hatred, that fuels parent-teacher conflict
Thanks for the answers jayron 32.
*2. Why is teaching to the test bad? *
I am in favor of teaching kids to ask questions and think about the answers. I can understand how basing the test on the material is a better way for a teacher to decide how much the student has learned. But how is this going to help a bureaucrat decide how much, and what, a teacher has taught.
Bureaucracies have a bad rap, but the reason that they are still around is that no one has come up with anything more efficient yet.
And who failed to teach this understanding?
Thanks for the opinion. I agree.
To go back to the original thread, not really, considering the hours, benefits, tenure etc. Note that when teachers want to be considered underpaid, they give their salary by the Year, but when the School boards want to show how much they are paid, they give it by the hour. Teachers out here earn about what I do, but work less hours in the year. In Silicon Valley, where houses run $500,000 on average, yes they are underpaid, but so are ALL of us Govt workers. You give up the stock options for tenure. Rightnow, with the economy redhot, its a bad trade, but when the layoffs start, its not so bad.
One of my buddies left to get a private sector job, and laughed at me as he was being paid twice what I was earning, not counting bonuses. Of course, at times he was working 80 hours a week, so that evened out. But 2 years later, when his co merged, and they laid him off, because they “wanted their own team”, he had to hock the beemer.
So if you do it for the kids, do it for the benefits, do it for the tenure, then it’s a good deal. The salary just isn’t that big a part of it.
“Performance” is entirely another thread, folks.
My immediate thought was, Yes - teachers are underpaid. However, when I looked at that chart I realized that the real answer is that some teachers are underpaid. The top 5 or 6 states in that list seem to be doing fine - keep in mind that teachers get an enormous amount of time off each year.
PeeQueue
jayron 32:
Excellent distinction - what you describe here is not what current educational theory calls “teaching.”
Teaching to a test teaches students that the goals of education are to memorize information, present it when asked to, then forget it to create room for more information.
Tests, as an institution, are losing support in the educational community. Most graduate programs now training teachers frowns on even using the word “test.” They prefer the cumbersome “evaluative experiece” and teach student teachers to use alternative forms of authentic assesment to chart student progress. To lose the jargon, teachers should now use real-world measures to check how students are learning.
Different issue. The fact of the matter is that beuarocrats get to decide what should be taught in public schools. And, since a good teacher understands that he or she should teach respect for proper authority as well as his or her specific subject matter, there should be no conflict between what school boards say should be taught and what the teacher teaches.
**
Another excellent point!
There’s a joke - Teachers became teachers for 3 reasons - June, July and August.
Ha ha.
The truth of the matter is that any teacher who becomes a teacher because he or she expects short hours and long vacations will burn out. Effective teachers do more “homework” than their students (I know I did) and spent their “vacations” at seminars or in their basements writing lesson-plans.
**
Another excellent point!
Parents are simply grown-up students.
True Story - My last year teaching, I had the parent of a mediocre student call me at home. She said that she was concerned about the mark her son had received. When I asked why, she told me (direct quote), “I think it’s too low - he shouldn’t be getting grades that low.” I told her that I agree, he should be doing work to earn higher grades (she missed the distinction), then asked her what she wanted me to do.
She asked me to raise the grade. I put her on hold and called the principal at home. He called her later that evening and, three days later, raised the student’s mark in my class.
At a meeting he explained that there was no blame aimed at me - I had been fair in my assessment.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
Danielinthewolvesden wrote:
Not entirely accurate.
Teachers spend a heck of a lot of hours “off the clock” grading students’ work and preparing lesson plans – both of which they are required to do, but neither of which is paid for as “hours worked”.
What you mean to say is that teachers spend less hours per year inside the building in which they work then you spend inside the building you work… NOT the same thing.
Most good teachers I know spend their summers lesson planning and taking extra training to remain competent. They also spend a few hourse every night grading and preparing for the next days lesson.
The problem is, teaching is not a job; its a profession. It’s not something people merely do for money; if I were looking for a job where I could leave at 5:00 PM and not have to do anything job related after work or on weekends, I could find one very easily. As a chemist, there are plenty of comperable lab positions I could take that would require no outside work… But teaching is not something on merely does to make money. I do it because it is a job that is rewarding merely of itself, and thus am willing to devote free time on vacations and weekends to improve at and to do what is necessary to be good at it. Most people who believe that teaching is a job that ends when the teacher leaves the school are sorely mistaken.
Underpaid? By what standard? In a market economy the definition of value is the price at which the good or service is bought/sold so if they are working for their salary, that is what their work is worth. If they were underpaid they’d be working elsewhere and their salaries would rise to lure them back.
On another note: I am sure there are many good teachers out there but I have met a few who were so ignorant and unprepared that it was appalling. I do not know what they were paid but, whatever it was, it was too much.
Tracer & Jayron: I agree teacher spend more hours "off line’ than many do, but they would have to work very long hours indeed, to make up for a 36 hour week, with 6 more holidays, and 2 1/2 months off in the summer. hell, I know it isn’t a soft job, I’m not saying that. One of my group is a teacher with tenure, and my dad was a teacher back in the 50’s, when Teachers were REALLY underpaid ( he took a job as a Gs7 Govt worker as it paid 25% more!). They work more than those hours indicate, but not enough to equal it out.
Sure , they got CPE, but so do I. I’m lucky in that as a Gov’t worker, they will pay for some/most/all of my CPE,(as do some schools) and give me the days to take it, but the nites studying are on my own. Overall, they work a few less hours, get about the same or a little bit better bennies, we both have “tenure”, they have a harder job, we get paid about the same, and until a few years ago, I would have said my job was WAY more dangerous, but I’m not so sure now…
pretty comparable. Oh, we both need BA degrees, but they in Ca also need those ‘BS’ extra classes for their cert.