It all depends. I’m a software engineer; my wife is a teacher. I have to work late int the evenings and on weekends sometimes, especially when there are major deadlines coming up. But not nearly as often as my wife, during the school year. She’s grading papers and creating lesson plans nearly every evening and weekend.
I wasn’t aware of that, my quick google search indicates that this is only the case for 14 states out of 50. So it isn’t the most common system.
I always knew Railroads still ran their own entirely separate retirement system, and I knew that historically long before SS there were pension systems for government employees such as police, teachers et cetera; I had assumed most of those had long been folded into SS.
But yeah, for the 14 states that don’t have SS at all, they would need to maintain some equivalent system. At least in Virginia, the teacher’s pension plan is for better than SS and is given in addition to the SS benefits they will receive at 65 (or 67 etc depending on current age.)
Not so. In some districts, more than half of all students are eligible for free- or reduced-price meals, and in some districts, nearly all do. In many cases, these meals are the only decent meals the child gets.
I missed this. My school is 45% free/reduced lunch, I believe. I’ve had kids who, when they don’t get to school for breakfast, will end up having a can of Diet Dr. Pepper for breakfast. Mom fail, no doubt–but given the mom-fail, it’s pretty important not to follow it up with society-fail.
What I’m saying is that I don’t see how it is relevant to look at the ratio of teacher pay to, say, lawyers in countries as different as the US and Korea. We have waaaay more lawyers per capita than most countries do.
Not really, and especially not across countries. Only a portion of GDP goes to paying salaries, and that is going to vary over time and vary by country.
I can’t make heads or tails out of that document, but I do see lots and lots of listing for “speech pathology” and “special ed” and subjects like that, which are specialty areas that wouldn’t do much to affect the average student performance in the US.
Yep, if there is indeed a shortage. But with the unemployment rate hovering around 10%, it’s hard to imagine there being a shortage of any type of profession the US.
How does it determine shortages? Is it talking about cases where the district is actually trying to hire and can’t find anyone? (This seems implausible to me.) Or rather, is it just talking about cases in which there should be a certain number of teachers in a school, but there are not that many? (Seems more plausible.)
All of my experience and that of my friends is that it’s practically impossible to find work teaching right now. No one’s hiring.
My quick search suggests that those 14 states are:
Alaska
Maine
California
Massachusetts
Colorado
Minnesota
Connecticut
Missouri
Illinois
Nevada
Kentucky
Ohio
Louisiana
Texas
There are some big states in there: according to Wiki, they add up to 40% of the population, and one assumes about 40% of teachers. So it isn’t a minor concern.
Ten percent of students in the U.S. are in special ed. If that 10% did significantly better, it would certainly affect student performance in general. And those 10% are certainly part of the students we hope to go forward to live lives as productive citizens (something most special ed students are quite capable of doing, provided they get a good education.
And I see lots of states (2/3 at least) showing shortages in math and science. Those are not minor topics.
This is a problem of decades-long standing. Presumably it will be with us after the economy improves, as it is wont to do.
Right now is kind of a special case, as most states are gutting their education budgets: we are talking about a 20% cut in our district. But even last year, and two years from now? It’s easy to find a job as a teacher, and any number of times I’ve seen classes “taught” by substitutes all year because no one could be found. There are districts where it is hard to get on–affluent suburbs, for the most part–and I do think they over pay their teachers: if you have that many people competing, you are paying too much. But in urban and rural districts–the ones with the lousy scores–it can be a challenge to just get a body in the classroom. I’ve seen this any number of times: it’s why programs like “Teach for America” exist.
Someone struggling to find a job as a teacher must be, IME, working within a pretty strict set of parameters: only a very certain subject, or only a very certain district, or something. And that’s their right. But if someone is willing to work anywhere, it’s generally pretty easy. The thing is, at the wages we are paying, few people are willing to work in an inner city school or out in Bumfuck.
And how fortunate we are for that–how our country does benefit!
Well, yes, but notice how the lines on that graph track one another in direction; this suggests that there’s correspondence between the two, taht they’re related. My point is that in a nation in which teachers are paid higher relative to GDP, they’re probably also paid higher relative to median income, compared to countries where they’re paid lower relative to GDP. But a comparison of teacher salaries to median salaries would be a better metric for this, I agree.
Yep. At a job fair I went to in 2007, the line for interviewing for a single district’s elementary ed positions was over an hour long. Nearby a neighboring district had a sign saying: “High school math teachers: $2500 signing bonus!” The principal manning that table was so bored :).
I think it goes a little deeper, however. Being able to teach meteorology, or even addition, effectively to a seven-year-old is actually fairly complicated, and a deep understanding of the underlying principles will absolutely help. But people who are gifted at math tend not to go into elementary ed, I suspect: there are far more lucrative fields for them. So our elementary kids get people teaching math and science who often aren’t very skilled in these fields themselves.
Aren’t these teacher shortages and surpluses mainly caused by an excess of teachers wanting to work in a particular region, and not wanting to work in a another? (The pay rate being one of the factors determining their ‘want’)
Isn’t any shortage of anything caused by this? I mean, if you are asking “are there enough people holding teaching certificates to fill demand?”, I have no idea. I suspect there are, since people often leave teaching to go into other fields.
However, my original point concerned long term feasibility of State run defined benefit pension plans. Most such plans essentially say that you take the average of the highest x number of years of pay for an individual once they retire. For conversation’s sake let’s say you take the average of the top 5 years of a person’s pay.
Then you give that person anywhere from 50 to 80% of that (in some systems I’ve even seen it go higher) for the rest of their life in the form of an annual benefit. If all of a sudden teacher’s are making six figures you can probably see how quickly we can run into funding issues?
With social security, high income individuals don’t really hurt the overall plan, because social security maxes out. Earnings over a certain amount are subject to Social Security withholding, and likewise, there is an absolute maximum dollar amount that you can receive in Social Security retirement benefit payments. Warren Buffet is entitled to the same payments as someone who earned roughly > $90k a year for most of their career.
And obviously I’d be talking about grandfathering in, you can’t pull the rugs out from under people who are near retirement. If we were going to raise teacher pay by 50% I would stipulate in the legislation that firstly no one hired after X date is eligible for the old defined benefit plan. I’d then say anyone currently in the system is still eligible for that plan but I’d put a hard cap on their benefit, so that they can’t collect 50-80% of a new higher salary but would instead only receive roughly what they would have if their earnings had not increased. I’d also give people the option to “cash out” of the pension plan and convert it to a 457 or similar plan for public employees.
Well, how many of them are in districts that have a teach shortage? If it’s even 20% of those students, that means we’re talking about 2% of the total students.
I’d like to see actual figures, not some qualitative analysis like the PDF you linked to. How many students are actually affected by a shortage of teachers?
I think we largely agree: my point is just that teachers salary structures as they are are very different than the norm–this is an historical kludge type thing–and any restructuring would be intensely complicated. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea or an impossible idea, just a complicated one. This is why homing in on “average compensation” is so difficult.
Okay.
This study(2002) establishes the main cause of teacher shortages to be high turnover, not retirement or lack of graduates: rather from teachers leaving due to
This report establishes that teacher turnover rates are high:
It goes on to mention that:
And that
I have over ten years of experience in public education, and this exactly matches my own observations. It’s hard to find qualified teachers willing to work under current conditions for current pay. If we want to change that, we have to change the conditions or the pay.
The study goes on to discuss the implications:
(Note: NCLB was supposed to help with this, and it may have some in the years since this study came out.)
Teacher turnover–which results in a constant pressure to hire new teachers as the leave the profession as quickly as they enter–is a real problem in education.
OK, it looks like there was a teacher shortage some 10 years ago. But again, in this economy? There’s this huge demand for teachers, and this high unemployment rate. Is there any evidence that these unemployed people are trying to get certified? If not, then something is wrong, and it’s not pay.
Right…but I would also say it’s on the people who want to boost teacher pay by 50% to figure out how to make it work, and just bankrupting State governments and/or raising taxes for all the people who work in that State or own property in that State for the sake of boosting teacher pay isn’t going to cut it.
For people like me to ever vote for politicians that advocate big bumps in teacher salary I would definitely require it be done in a way that doesn’t totally fuck over States with unsustainable long term pension obligations. Public employees (including teachers) have the pension systems they do because long ago it was seen as a service for the greater public good, that paid worse than what you could have made elsewhere. The trade off was partially just a feeling of civic pride, and then the monetary compensation was the fact that the State would take care of you for the rest of your life. If you guys want to make significantly more than the average college educated worker in the United States then I can’t see a compelling reason to keep the benefit system, you’re no longer taking lower pay so why should you get anything different than those other workers?
And there will be a teacher shortage again in 3 years when the economy picks back up. We have a long-term teacher shortage/high turnover problem that is not going to go away because of a few years of high cyclical unemployment. In the meantime, we have a situation where the most capable teachers will flee the profession because of declining wages and worsening conditions. “Fixing” the teacher shortage by putting 40 kids in a classroom is not a solution that will improve education.