Just wondering how supply and demand works in public education. Do math and science teachers for primary and secondary public schools get more money vs other teachers?
Nope!
Contracts that I’ve seen all pay a teacher based on years of service and education level only.
What Saint Cad said.
Is their really a high demand for science and math teachers now?
Teachers of any quality, certainly, at least, this is the case in South Africa…
Compared to English teachers and the like, yeah. Often you need higher qualifications, like a B.S. in a relevant science field in addition to an education degree, for instance, whereas an English teacher might only have that education degree.
For the last 20 years or so, secondary teachers have had to have a B.A. or B.S. in their field–even us lowly English teachers (though adding additional certifications may be simple, depending on the state).
In Texas, at least, teachers in a district all get paid off the same scale based on education and years of experience. That said, different districts will have stipends for hard-to-staff areas, like math, science, ESL–these are typically $1-3K/year. Unlike salary, they can be canceled pretty easily if funds get tight.
That said, there are lot of things in teaching that carry stipends or extra duty pay: summer work for the district or summer school, coaching, chairing departments, Saturday school, incentive programs. I add 20% to my salary through these types of things. So the incentives for math, science, and ESL (the most common, IME) are part of a broader context.
I’d say “evidently!” but that would be mean. So I’ll have it both ways. 
I work in the part of the British government that deals with science and maths education, and I can tell you that the answer is a resounding no in this country. Whilst some types of schools have greater flexibility on how and what they pay their staff, most have to follow the School Teachers Pay and Conditions Document which doesn’t allow for variation in pay for subject, only for length of service and level of seniority.
Given that there is a shortage of maths, chemistry and physics teachers (the last one particularly so) you’d be right in thinking that we’re missing a trick here. Every review or report that I can think of that covers STEM education has recommended that graduates in shortage areas be either paid more or given better incentives to join the teacher workforce.
The Conservative party has said in its manifesto that it would pay “good teachers more” (doesn’t say how it would define that though) and that it would pay back the student loans of maths and science graduates as long as they remained in teaching, so if they end up forming a government expect this to change relatively soon (although they also want to raise the threshold for qualifying for state funded teacher training to a 2:2 degree in a subject).
Basically if you have a good quality degree in maths or physics you’ve got a job for life as a teacher (whether you’d want one is a completely separate matter).
[Ignorant conjecture]I think it might have something to do with the fact that they’re in unions…[/Ignorant conjecture]
More money, no. More jobs, yes. You will find it easier (as a general rule) to find a job teaching math or science than you will teaching English or History. That’s why I picked up certification in Life and Earth Sciences early on - my regular certs. are in Social Studies and English. Ended up using them, too.
In any collective bargaining state, no. For reasons I don’t want to get into here, unions are very much against any animals being more equal than other animals. However, as mentioned upthread, it is different elsewhere. When I taught biology in Laredo TX, I collected a science/math stipend of IIRC $1200 above what the other teachers got.
Not in New York they don’t. I wish we did!
Very true. There’s even some school districts that are so hard up for science and math teachers that they will hire people with no education degree or experience, just a BS/MS in a science or math, and pay for them to undergo the state min. training to get a certificate or degree to teach.
And in some places, education level doesn’t matter either! In Québec, years of service are the only thing that changes your pay rate (once you have tenure…which isn’t as simple as saying “after X years” because new teachers get placed in 95% teaching positions - that are really 100% of the job anyways - which don’t count towards permanence. My cousin is in her third year of full-time teaching in an officially not full-time position; no (fewer) benefits, no permanence, no job security. Lucky for her, she’s good, so they keep her).
When I was looking to change careers, I was told that since I had a BSc and work experience as a chemist, I could start teaching immediately and only have to get my education certificate within (I think) 7 years! I would have started at the salary of any first year teacher, which was about 60% of the salary of the job I was leaving! I don’t want to teach, and I’m now in school working towards a career where I will start at about 120% of the salary of what I left.
At the university level, the answer is… sometimes.
Typically, the high demand people (which is not just math and science but also economics-- people who could get better paying jobs outside the education field) do get paid more than the low demand people (English for example). At the univeristy where I currently work, it was the policy (until recently) that all fields would be paid the same. The only pay differences came from rank (assistant professor, professor, and associate professor).
However, the university president convinced the state legislators to give us more money (since our pay was woefully low compared to comparable institutions), so we all got pay raises in a strange way: they tried to average out what a typical professor (regardless of field) would get paid with what a typical professor of a specific field would be paid. The end result is that us high demand people got larger pay raises than the low demand people, but it wasn’t as huge a gap as it would have been if they hadn’t tried to placate the humanities people. And still one of the English professors was griping pretty hard.
Of course, it’s all pretty much a moot point since due to low state revenues this year, we’ve all had to take a pay cut, so our raises didn’t really amount to much after all.
wat
Here in NC teachers get bonuses if their classes do well on state end of year tests.
One of the big problems you’d run into is supply and demand problems at the local level. Here in Missouri (and some other states) teacher certification is set to grade level, not specialization: in other words, you’re certified to teach elementary school, high school, early childhood, etc.) So let’s say a school district decides to offer math/science teachers a bonus. Immediately all the English and history teachers petition to change departments. By the same token, you could wind up with a surplus of teachers in English, and a shortage in math, so you’re laying off lower-salaried English teachers and replacing them with higher-paid math teachers. Or a laid-off English teacher could go back to school for a year, get a degree in math, and come back to a job that paid more than if she had stayed in teaching that year. If you think the unions wouldn’t like that option, guess how the the taxpayers would react.
I can comment on this from experience at two public high schools in the U.S. The first was a traditional public high school, and my salary as a physics teacher was simply based on my teaching experience (# of years) and my education level (Master’s degree, in my case).
The second school, however, was a charter school, and the principal had the ability to put someone wherever she wanted on the pay scale (more or less). When I applied, I had decided that whatever job I got, I wanted to make $50k a year (which was a big leap from my previous teaching position). At the charter school, the principal made me an offer that put me at a place on the pay scale that would have had me making $46k or so per year. I decided to see if I could bargain, and I said, “You know, I have seven years active duty experience in the military, and I think that should give me more ‘years’ experience.” She then asked, “How much money do you want to make?” and I replied that I wanted to make $50k. The next day, she emailed me and said she had adjusted my place on the scale to give me five years extra experience for the military time, and it put me at $50.2k per year. I took the job.
So, in the end, I was able to bargain but only because it was a charter school and the principal had leeway in assigning my place on the scale.
As others here have stated, it depends on experience and years of service. When I was in the credentialing program, the people that seemed to have the most prospect were the students with physics degrees. They could teach physics, but if they couldn’t they could teach math or get an emergency credential to teach chemistry.
However, it changes all the times, as state above. When I was in high school, the highest paid teacher wasn’t a math or science one. It was the drafting class teacher, who was making about $70,000, in 1993.