I dug into your cites a bit. While I don’t have any issues with them having nice pensions, your second cite doesn’t actually say what you claim. Their chart shows the $76000 is the average after 30 years of service at age 60. No idea if it’s accurate or not, since the author is just your standard limited-government, anti-tax talking head. Since the site is run by this guy, I’ll treat it the same as I’d treat an opinion piece found on OANN and assume it’s bullshit without bothering to spend any more effort on it.
As for your first cite, they use data from the National Council on Teacher Quality. Sounds innocuous enough, but it happens to be an arm of The Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is an ideologically conservative American nonprofit education policy think tank.
If I want to find out the truth around teachers or unions, I usually steer clear of those types of sources. Where they don’t lie, they are usually cherry-picking, and I have to fill out a form if I want to see the underlying data.
I did find a source that seems somewhat trustworthy and actually lays out an adjusted salary comparison by state. The problem is pretty visible at a glance. Illinois ranks extremely high in teacher salary adjusted for cost of living. The problem is that is Illinois, not Chicago. You’ll note that they show the Cost of Living for Illinois as lower than North Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico, South Carolina and others. While that might be true for the state, I find it hard to believe that it’s true in Chicago proper.
So far, I don’t buy that they are incompetent, overpaid, nor underworked, but am open to proof to the contrary.
It remains that the teachers are far from being underpaid. I live in Chicago. I am well aware of the cost of living here. $64,000/year is a very liveable salary. You are not rich but you can certainly maintain a decent middle-class living on it. And, of course, their salaries go north from there.
This website says the average pension for a Chicago school teacher is a bit over $58,000/year. Presumably some are less and some are more.
How many jobs can you think of in the US where you can earn over $64,000/year and retire at an early age with a $58,000/year pension for life?
That is excellent compensation in the US today.
No matter how you slice it Chicago school teachers are well compensated.
As for underworked I dunno. There are 176 school days in the year in Chicago. Teachers work more than that but still far less than the basic 261 workdays in a year everyone else deals with.
During the school year, her calculations show that teachers work 39.8 hours per week while nonteachers work 41.5 hours. During the summer, teachers do work noticeably fewer hours. West reports that teachers work 21.5 hours per week during the summer. SOURCE
It’s below the average salary for the city ($72k) according to one website, though not far below it. So if for the sake of argument we stipulate “liveable” is not underpaid, would you agree with dale42 that they are overpaid (never mind his value judgements of incompetent and underworked)?
According to this average salary in Chicago is $44,063 /year. That is a lot less than $64,000/year.
Further, Chicago teachers can make a lot more than $64k. They can get salaries over $100k/year. Of course, they have to work up to that but that is normal in pretty much every job ever.
Add in that they work fewer hours than most full-time workers and have a fucking fantastic pension plan…
Yeah. They are overpaid IMO (when including their pension as part of their total compensation). Without question they are not underpaid and have no room to bitch about their compensation these days (but they do anyway).
NOTE: I am not saying teachers do not deserve a good income. They do. I am saying that Chicago teachers already have a great compensation package.
The only way to decide if compensation is “fair” is to see if they are able to hire the quality of teachers they want in the quantities they need. If there are a ton of vacancies all the time, or if many positions are held by people that were only hired because they were the sole candidate, however unsuitable, than teacher salaries are too low: the people you want don’t think the job is worth the salary, even if you think they “should” be satisfied. Of, on the other hand, there is an abundance of qualified candidates, that’s a good sign the salary is appropriate or even high.
By that reckoning minimum wage workers do not deserve higher wages since, clearly, there are plenty willing to work for $7.25/hour (or perhaps even less).
Let me rephrase: if you are having trouble staffing, the salary is certainly not too high, or more than they “deserve”. If it were, applicants would line up.
If you have no trouble filling positions, from an economic standpoint, the wage is appropriate. However, there may be other externalities and social factors that would make a higher wage good policy.
But “deserve” has nothing to do with it for any of them.
I can count at least 7 people out of 40 or so in my department in the home office of a retailer that make $100k or more. Pretty much ANY teacher has a bigger impact on society than any of us do. I do not begrudge them their salaries.
By the way, comparisons to “average salary in Chicago” is misleading. Chicago teachers, along with all other governmental jobs in the city, are REQUIRED to live within the city limits. Cost of living in the city is much higher than in the 'burbs, where most of the college educated higher earners working in Chicago live. They have much less disposable income than others in their salary level.
Starting with bachelor’s: $56,665
Starting with master’s: $60,590
Highest possible: $108,242
That is a decent salary range. You won’t get rich doing it but it is a solid middle-class wage.
And, as mentioned, that does not account for their fabulous pension plan, a generally younger retirement age and fewer hours worked per year than other full-time workers.
Again, Chicago teachers are paid well. They are not suffering pittance wages. Not even close.
I have looked into living in the suburbs. It is not necessarily cheaper at all. Indeed, it can be a lot more expensive. Can you find cheaper suburbs? Sure. You can also find cheap parts of Chicago to live in.
Add in the costs of a commute and you are simply not necessarily better off in the suburbs.
I don’t recall anyone saying that Chicago teachers got pittance wages in this thread. The original claim is that they are overpaid. Now you are making the claim that they aren’t getting pittance wages. Excluded middle anyone? Being able to afford a middle class lifestyle while doing a professional job seems exactly correct to me. Do you think they should be paid under middle class wages, or below average wages? If so, where are you going to find quality candidates that way?
While I agree with everything that @Airbeck said, I’m not even sure how we got here from my post. I was so confused by your responses to my responses to the OP, @Whack-a-Mole, that I went and looked at your history with the word “teachers” in it to see why you hated them so. Turns out you seem okay with teachers historically, but have a grudge with teacher’s unions in general. While that’s certainly a topic that might be worth discussing, I’m not sure this thread is the place to do so.
As far as I know, there is no “complaint” against Lightfoot. There are unsourced and unsubstantiated rumors, which a political rival appears to be circulating and amplifying. That’s a very different things.
I’m not a Chicago resident, and I have no horse int his race. And I’m not reflexively defending a Democrat. In another, unrelated thread, I was critical of those in the thread (and in the media) who were circulating and amplifying unsourced, unverified rumors about Lindsay Graham.
Insinuation and innuendo are not legitimate parts of the political discourse.
Every conservative or Republican on my facebook news feed and in my neighborhood groups (south side of Chicago) fell for these rumors. These are the same people that shouted “FAKE NEWS” about anything and everything negative about Trump for the last 4 years. That they can’t see this contradiction is mind boggling to me.