Sure, in the micro case that’s always true. In any profession there will be areas that require higher pay or benefits to attract candidates. I would agree with you that if there is an area that needs teachers and can’t hire them, that’s an indication that teachers in that area are underpaid. Unless, of course, there’s something else going on like artificial restrictions in the teacher market due to unreasonable requirements. One of the things licensing boards do is restrict entry into the field to help maintain the salaries of the current work force. I have no idea if that’s the case in these areas, but at least you have objective evidence that there is not enough incentive to do whatever it takes to be a teacher there.
Ultimately, trying to convince people that one job is ‘harder’ than another is pointless. There are a million intangibles in every job that make it better or worse, and it’s also very much a matter of whether the tasks of the job match your inclinations. My brother loves his job because it lets him work with his hands in the outdoors. That job is my idea of living hell.
Teachers benefit from a lot of little rewards - seeing the light come on in a student’s eyes, watching your school band win the city band competition, being given a basket of flowers by your students at the year end pep rally, having a lot of personal autonomy in how you run your classroom and how you teach, etc. The work is generally pleasant and indoors, and has enough variety that you’re not just stuck at a desk shuffling papers all the time.
Programmers tend to like their jobs, but programming is routinely rated as one of the most boring jobs in America, because most people can’t imagine being stuck at a desk typing symbols on a keyboard 8 hours a day for the rest of their lives.
Ultimately, there’s only one comparison that matters. If you need to hire someone, you offer as much money as you need to attract the candidate you want. No more, no less. That’s what the job is ‘worth’. Unfortunately, teachers operate in a public monopoly and are funded by taxpayer dollars, so all the incentives that let us evaluate how much they should be paid are broken.
I hardly know where to begin. Some of the posts here are glaringly lacking in full comprehension of what a teacher actually does.
Have you ever had to take a weapon away from someone at your job? Have any of the people on your job threatened to slit your throad or throw acid on you? Have you ever been hospitalized for injuries sustained from trespassers roaming freely through the hallways? Have you had people bring in handguns to your office with the intent of killing someone? Has anyone ever thrown a number of rocks at you and the boss did nothing about it? Ever had someone throw a brick, firecracker, or eggs at you on the job? Have you ever been required to work with someone in labor so that she could take a test? Have you ever had someone you really cared about and worked with murdered while you were on the job? Would you enjoy a job where you were laid off for 10 weeks every year? Have you ever had to work extra unpaid hours on packing up the machines, books, supplies, furniture, etc. in your office?
What is the going rate for babysitters these days? If school systems could just pay that rate per student, per hour, what would be the take home pay for a teacher who had 150 students and had to do much more than babysit them?.
What makes you think that the majority of teachers belong to a union? The American Federation of Teachers is a union, but it does not have membership everywhere. As far as I know, the National Education is still not a union. Teachers do get fired for being insubordinate, for being away from their posts of duty, for being incompetent. One of the most famous teachers who was fired went on to write very successful novels. One of his biographical-novels was largely about his own teaching experiences on an island off the coast of South Carolina. His name is Pat Conroy.
Teachers are not paid hourly wages. To do so would bankrupt the city.
Finally, I was once criticized by an evaluator for not having discipline problems in one of my fundamental classes. She said that she couldn’t evaluate my ability to control discipline problems because there were none.
That “extra vacation time” that you speak of is called unemployment in any other profession.
Not to mention that, in some districts around here at least, nearly everyone is fired every June. Only when they get the student headcount at the end of the summer do they rehire as many of the teachers as they actually need. So you get to go through your summer months of unemployment (during which you cannot collect Unemployment) not knowing if you’ll have a job in August…every single year.
Oh, BOO HOO. For God’s sake, you’re not working in Fallujah. Yes, teachers have to deal with unruly kids. That’s one of the negatives of the job. Of course you realize that just about everyone with a job can reel off lists of big negatives, right? You do know that the kid working the local 7-11 on the night shift has a job infinitely more dangerous than yours, don’t you? You have kids yelling at you, but every retail clerk in America has to deal with ADULTS who sometimes tee off on them, and yes even threaten physical violence. I worked in a Radio Shack in a bad neighborhood, and when I was on the evening shift by myself I had to worry every time the door opened whether I was going to be robbed. I once had a drunk come in and threaten me for no particular reason. But you know, overall it was a pretty good job.
How often do you go into a job performance review wondering if you’re going to have a job when you come out? That’s the reality that faces every non-union worker in the country. How often do you read about problems in your school and have to think, “Oh God, I wonder if it’s going to be shut down and I’ll lose my job?” That’s also the reality for anyone who works in the private sector.
Every time my company has a ‘re-alignment’ or shuts down development on a product, people are laid off. I’ve been under threats of layoffs several times in the past few years because of the economy, and a number of my friends and co-workers weren’t as lucky, and they’re out of work. But you don’t have to worry much about that, do you?
What a ridiculous analogy. How about a better one: Daycare workers look after classrooms of kids too. and around here they get about $10/hr. Since you’re the one equating your job with babysitting, would you like that salary?
There are teachers in private schools, and in vocational schools, and in corporate environments, and in hospitals where there are children, and all sorts of places. So what? That’s not who we’re talking about. We’re talking about teachers in the public education system.
Pat Conroy was fired in 1972. That’s 40 bleemin’ years ago. I don’t think his story is representative of what goes on in public education today.
Welcome to the world of white collar professionals, who are hired to do a job, and no one particularly cares how many hours it takes you.
And yet I notice you still have a job. Did you take a pay cut? Or have any other negative consequences? In my job, a bad performance review means at best you won’t be getting a raise that year. At worst, you’ll be dismissed. That happens to a handful of workers every year. How many teachers in your school have been fired for incompetence or any other reason in the past 10 years?
No, it’s not. It’s called vacation time. In some professions, very senior people can get 8 weeks of vacation, and they don’t consider it unemployment. Can you collect unemployment insurance in the summer?
Edit: it occurs to me that Sam’s loathing of public-sector employees, specifically teachers, is just a Republican talking-points hijack, so I’ll not participate in it further. We can take it as given that teachers are the horrible lazy incompetent whiners of Sam’s fevered imagination, and move on with the discussion of whether a longer school year is a good thing.
But you seem to assume that your area is the “norm” and everywhere that is having a shortage is some “micro case”. Do you think it’s only suburban teachers in districts with applicants five deep that are complaining they are underpaid? It’s people trying to save districts that can’t get qualified bodies in the classroom that are saying this, and to have those claims dismissed as just whining is really insulting.
This isn’t a few areas. On paper it looks a little better now because we are in an era of cutbacks in state and local budgets, but it’s damn hard to find quality teachers. Licensing boards aren’t keeping talented people away from medicine or law or accounting. Why do you suspect that in teaching–with easier licensing requirements than any of those–that is the problem?
I agree with this. There are a million jobs out there that are shittier than teachers that pay less and add more to society. I’ve never argued otherwise.
So you agree that all this is irrelevant? Why did you type it out?
But still, in many areas and many subjects, we can’t find the teachers we need to do the job. That’s not an argument that they are over-compensated.
No, it’s not. Unlike the senior VP with 8 weeks vacation, a teacher’s time off is unpaid. It doesn’t matter if you get a check nine times a year or twelve, you only get paid for 187 days. This matters, because if you have to take unpaid leave (because, say, you have cancer or something), you lose 1/180th of your salary per day, as opposed to the 1/260 of salary you would lose in a year-round job. This means that if you take 12 weeks off for FMLA, you might be back for another month or more before you start to get paid again. You also can’t collect unemployment insurance because I don’t even know why. They just make sure you can’t.
How can you have a discussion of extending the school year without a discussion of the very powerful lobby that will oppose such a move from the outset?
I do not have loathing for public sector employees. I think there are a whole lot of great teachers out there, and great people working in the public sector. This has nothing to do with the people doing the job.
The problem is in the system itself. Notice how often teachers complain about their jobs. Do you know why that is? Because they HAVE to. They exist in a system where their standard of living is determined by their union’s clout, and their union gains clout by claiming that teachers are either uniquely gifted, or they are somehow ‘special’ to the economy in ways that other careers aren’t, and that they are underpaid and over-worked.
This is the worst thing about unions - they maintain their power through the creation of an adversarial relationship between ‘workers’ and ‘management’. In the case of public unions it’s even worse because they also have to convince the public that their workers are somehow being wronged. To a union, a workforce with a sense of grievance is a good thing, and they do everything in their power to create one. My wife was in a nursing union, and we were constantly bombarded with newsletters from them calling out supposed management malfeasance, tales of woe, and suggestions that nurses were getting the shaft.
I have nothing against teachers. I have something against a system that lets the bad ones keep teaching children and which doesn’t reward the good ones for excellence, and a system that requires teachers to constantly air grievances in order to get benefits and pay raises.
In terms of licensing requirements distorting the market, it’s worth mentioning that the problem is not that no one is becoming a teacher, it’s that few people are staying in the profession: “46% of new teachers leave the profession within five years”. This problem is not a matter of no one can handle the onerous certification process (oh noes! a six month unpaid internship!) or that teachers are secretly happy but bellyaching in public to get raises. This is almost a majority of teachers deciding, within five years, that it isn’t in their rational interest to stay in the profession.
I think what we are seeing is a correction of a market distortion: I think for a lot of years there was a glut of competent teachers because it was one of the few available options for an intelligent woman who wanted to be treated professionally. There were a lot more of those around even ten years ago, but they are all but gone at this point. It’s getting to the point where teaching isn’t worth it to the kinds of people we want to be teachers. I am actually pretty open to the argument that just improving salary isn’t the most cost-effective solution–improving working conditions would probably be a cheaper way, in many cases, to make teaching attractive to the right kind of people–but don’t dismiss teaching complaints as manufactured drama. In many areas, the good ones are leaving, when they can be found at all.
Are you sure that they’re not leaving the workforce that early because they can’t get full-time work, because the senior teachers don’t get fired?
It seems to me that around here, a lot of the young teachers are on ‘permanent substitute’ status. The system adapts to the seniority system and impossibility of firing tenured teachers by maintaining a large pool of substitutes, and these teachers have difficult working conditions because they’re always changing schools, they have no time to build rapport with the kids, etc.
Well, thisis the brief of the classic–though far from only–study on the high cost of teacher turnover. The fact that teacher turnover is seen as a major cost suggests that it’s not just a bunch of part-timers drifting off.
From the Forbes article I cited earlier:
That’s not veteran union teachers keeping new blood out: that’s a profession that sounds good on paper but isn’t worth the money once you see the reality.
I can’t understand those parents who are in favour of long holidays so that their kids can hang around the house,or elsewhere while they’re at work.
Some could see this as a recipe for mischief making.
And as for the travel argument, in the real world most parents can’t afford to take their kids hiking in Nepal for a month, or whatever.
An alternative idea from extending conventional education, as in the normal school routine of classes etc. could be to have statutory “camps”, held in what would otherwise be vacated school premises, for sport, art, computers or whatever you can think of that will fly.
These could be of a less competetive nature then the normal programme, with the emphasis on learning while you enjoy, with everything learned held as a knowlege bonus, and poor performance not held as a demerit for the rest of the academic year.