Well, if you count it that way, then anybody who works only part of the year can get paid extra by working another job during the other part, if they have time. There’s nothing special about teachers in that sense. I mean, if someone has a job working for H&R Block preparing tax returns and works only during the tax season from November (say) through April, then he could paid extra by working another job during the off season.
My health care benefits, in private industry, are better than my wife’s, who is a public school teacher. So much so that she does not participate in her school district’s plan, and instead is on my plan.
One project at a time? Really? That would be a vacation on any job I’ve ever worked.
I must have gone to different schools because I’ve never had a teacher who couldn’t leave the room for a few minutes between classes.
It’s pointless to play the “which job sucks more” game. Everybody has their cross to bear. I don’t mind giving a nod to a good teacher but this open-ended praise of the lowly educator is getting old. It sucks for the rest of us too.
we rotated classes in grade school except for the first couple of grades. We also had a 2 way speaker system so if a teacher wanted a break they called the principle. It wasn’t rocket science. My teachers got to eat lunch and go to the bathroom.
So, those would be reasonable concessions for teachers to ask for, then? And you don’t have a problem with the majority of teachers in this country who don’t have such amenities demanding better working conditions?
I’d expect people involved with basic education to be able to figure this stuff out. It’s not even concession material but yah, knock yourselves out. Get a picket line set up because you can’t figure out how to pee.
I don’t see where teachers are any different then anybody else who works for a living. There are great teachers, OK teachers and teachers who should be sacked immediately for gross incompetence.
Why the need for all the extra love?
in 16 years of classes I can name 5 teachers that deserve praise. 5. It doesn’t mean the rest of them suck (although some of them did). It just means that they did their jobs successfully. They get a passing grade.
I’ll go so far as to explain my favorite teachers. There was the 4th grade nun who was the reincarnation of the nun in the Sound of Music. You’d swear the movie was about her.
There was the 7th grade science teacher who took us on working field trips on stuff like recycling( before communities recycled). We went door to door collecting materials and then cashed it in. He linked the best students with the worst in class study groups in order to give individual instruction to those who were struggling. He let the better students teach segments of class as part of the process. He sat back and watched his students teach themselves without actually teaching class himself. This was the 60’s. “new math” hadn’t yet made it impossible for students to make change from a monetary transaction.
Throw in a handful of college professors who taught students how to think in addition to their curriculum and you have a handful of “da bombs”. To those I say thank you for being damn good at what you do.
Thank you for giving me a pass on the mixed metaphors and about half a dozen grammatical errors.
Now, back to it.
At this link, the average Wisconsin schoolteacher gets about $76,000 per year in overall compensation. And at this link, private sector employees with bachelor’s degrees receive an average of $91K in total compensation, and those with master’s degrees receive an average of $119K. If teachers could get paid for 8-12 weeks of summer at their rate during the school year, they would be hovering around the $90K and $99K range, which I believe is barely less than in the private sector, depending on the mix of degrees.
But they don’t generally have that option. If an opportunity is available, they can teach summer school, but that’s not for the full summer. Otherwise, they do whatever they can, and unless it involves working on fishing boats in the northern seas, they’re not likely to earn as much as their teaching salaries.
And everyone who’s seeing those numbers, stop, drop and look at the last compensation paperwork you got from your company (unless you’re a sole proprietor). The same thing applies to you; your total compensation is much higher than your salary, by between 25% and 40%. FICA is matched; your medical is probably partially paid or perhaps fully paid, you may get matching 401K funds, you may get some money contributed to a pension fund.
The stupid part of this argument is that people don’t realize that in negotiations, unions make concessions over pay by having their pensions and/or health benefits funded at higher rates. So first, you can’t separate health, pension and salary from each other, which is what the WI governor wants to do. And second, the unions are not the only ones at the negotiation table. Management is there, too, and they get brownie points from their bosses or constituents if they keep salaries low, because they’re focusing on shorter-term costs.
And please be aware that these pension funding crises are associated with contracts that they made. A teacher whose union agrees to have a lower salaries in exchange for higher pension benefits works for many years, assuming that, well, he’s not getting rich, but that’s okay, because there’ll be that pension. It’s not his fault if management didn’t fund the pension adequately, per the contract, and it’s not his fault that the managers made some bad calls. Health care has become a lot more expensive, and it’s not the teachers’ fault. People are living longer, and it’s not the teachers’ fault.
You know how General Electric ends up paying no corporate taxes in the US? That’s because they have lawyers scrutinizing every loophole to find ways to become exempt from taxes, and they take advantave of them, and even if the overall result irritates the crap out of us, it’s written in black ink on white paper, and therefore we have to honor that. Why do we seem to consider it optional to honor agreements made with the unions?
Part of the reason why teachers are special is because they’re one of the few professionals that virtually everyone comes into contact with at some point in their lives. I can live my entire life never having to hire an accountant or a lawyer, but you can bet I’ve had teachers. They’re also the most likely to make an impression.
That being said, part of the challenge of modern education is that there are so many vocal stakeholders. The federal and state governments establish law and policy and write the occasional check. The local schoolboard negotiates labor contracts, not just for teachers but for support staff, as well; it also has to implement policy while keeping the teachers, parents, students and taxpayers happy. Parents and students are the raison d’etre for schools. Teachers, too. Taxpayers pay the bills and are known to bitch if they think their taxes are too high. Unfortunately, this feeling tends to overshadow the fact that the amount they’re paying tends to be a bargain in the grander scheme of things, because if you want good schools that increase property values and community development, you gotta pay for 'em. There are also no natural checks and balances either, so if one group gets vocal enough, it tends to get what it wants. Unfortunately, as the backbone of the system, teachers tend to get the worst of it.
Why wouldn’t you count it that way? If I get a job where I only have to work 75% of the year, my earning potential is salary + whatever I can make during the summer. If you can make the same pay/day, that’s a desirable 33% (not 25%) bonus.* The teachers in my family all take advantage of this, although the Bureau of Labor Statistics (PDF) tells me only ~50% of teachers work in July. Given that the average schoolday is only 6.7 hours (Nation Center for Education Statistics), one might think they’d also take on extra work in the afternoons, but they don’t feel the need. I can’t find information on how many of those 6.7 hours are taken up by non-teaching prep periods and lunch. My search yields one school district which guarantees an average of 3.25 hours/week of prep time each week. A reply to my email to family gives us a single anecdote of one prep period per day (actually more, but the extra time is usually devoted to meetings and such.) I visited her once and lunch was damn short.
The schoolday is short, and some may be critical of the average of only 5.6 hours worked per day, but keep in mind that this includes time spent working on weekends, so that adds up to an average workweek of 39.2 hours.
*An extreme example of this is a married pair of professors I know who clear an extra $98,000 each summer.
Where do you get 5.6 hours worked per day? Note that the average school day is the time the *students *spend in school, not the time the *teachers *spend working. I know a number of teachers, and there is more to their official work day than just the time spent in class teaching, and that’s not even counting the unofficial work time spent on evenings and weekends.
No one is claiming otherwise. The numbers in the study supposedly account for weekend work.
These are numbers that teachers reported. They may have lied. The study may have been poorly conducted. I’m looking for additional studies to see if the numbers differ.
I am a big fan of teachers. I think they should get paid more. Then two of the best teachers I had in middle school wouldn’t have stopped teaching to do admin work instead. However, I don’t think this is going to happen until we as a society value teachers more than we value, oh, sports figures.
But I’m not sure how much of a fan I am of teachers’ unions. I’ve known several teachers who hated them and didn’t want to belong to them but were forced to. I think they felt the unions didn’t really represent their best interests-- that they were more geared to the interests of old teachers who might not be teaching very well as opposed to the young, dynamic teachers-- and felt resentment that they were forced to pay union dues – but I may be remembering incorrectly. Are there any teachers here who would like to chime in with what they do or don’t like about teachers’ unions?
And while its true that there are worse jobs than teachers, there are few that have as an obscene cost/benefit ratio disparity. A country rises and falls based on the education of it’s citizens and teachers in general are on the front lines of that struggle.
But more pointedly, the need for all the extra love these days is because they’re being scapegoated. Or haven’t you noticed?
Americans are tense because the economy is not strong due of a string of events stretching back to the dotcom burst extending through terrorism and corporate malfeasance. Yet there is a vociferous wing of American political ideology that is pointing the finger at a group of Americans — who maybe not-so-coincidentally don’t traditionally vote in their direction — and says **“Them! They are the ones that are dragging everyday Americans down! We have to stop them before it’s too late!” **
I’m a teacher, and I’ll just chime in to say that in my state (Texas) as well as several others, there are NO teachers unions. We have professional associations that many of us choose to join ( for about $100 annual dues) solely for the liability insurance they provide. But we don’t have unions. so no collective bargaining here, and no bullet-proof contracts that would prevent incompetent teachers from being fired. Nevertheless, I’ve worked with plenty of incompetent teachers* here, so doing away with binding contracts doesn’t necessarily solve that problem. (You need to make teaching a more attractive career choice if you want to draw competent people in to replace the bad teachers.) Texas and the other states without teachers unions generally don’t fare all that well in student performance compared with many of the states that have them.
We are in a funding crisis here, and things are going to get pretty ugly in the next several months (widespread large-scale teacher layoffs, much more costly health insurance, cutting student arts and athletic programs, increasing class sizes, etc.) Under the circumstances, having a union as a layer of protection sounds pretty appealing right now. But I say that without having any experience working in a place with unions.
*I’ve also worked with a LOT of highly competent and effective teachers. Just as in other professions, teachers run the spectrum from awful to excellent.