Now if your degree is in underwater basket weaving and you want to teach science, you do have to pass a subject area exam, but those are not particularly difficult if you know the subject. It goes like this in Florida (if memory serves).
Step 1) Have a four-year-degree in literally anything. Pass a subject area exam if your degree is not in the subject you want to teach.
Step 2) Get offered a job teaching.
Step 3) Get a temporary certificate, good for three years.
Step 4) Jump through the various state-mandated hoops within three years to get a permanent certificate.
Viola.
Individual districts will likely have their own hoops to jump through for new teachers, but those are the state requirements.
The broad point is that getting into the classroom is not at all difficult. There is no shortage of qualified humans - only a shortage of qualified humans who want to do the job.
My wife is an educator and works as an elementary teacher in a slightly lower income school district than the rest of the immediate area.
I honestly dont know how teachers are expected to actually make a decent life out of their pay they receive which is after taking account for summer break and is somewhere around $25/hr. Especially when they are usually paying back significant student loans. The lack of teachers now becomes harder as they can now go work even menial jobs and make close to that amount.
My wife spends around $3,000 a year out of her pocket in school supplies and items for her classroom. Some of these items would be expected for the parent to provide themselves, but because this is a lower household income district most can’t provide. Other things she buys are multiple different scientific experiment kits, a book fair acount (so everyone gets books), and believe it not quite a surprising amount of food.
We always joke that if we were to divorce my standard of living would remain the same and hers would take a serious nose-dive. In reality she would have a very hard time paying for an apartment or house, vehicle, and day-to-day expenses.
And I hate when people say “teachers get a 3 month vacation”, when it’s 3 months WITHOT pay, so they have to really budget their money to stretch 9 months’ pay for 12 months’ expenses, as well as having to pay for training. Also, teachers cannot get welfare or unemployment during that off time because they’re still “employed”
One thing that often confuses people about this is that teachers in many districts can structure their pay so it comes throughout the year, but that doesn’t mean they are actually paid for vacation.
For example, a teacher that makes (hypothetically) $90,000 a year normally gets $10,000 a month during the school year, and zero during the summer. In many school districts she can request her pay to be restructured so that she gets $7500 a month during the school year, with the remaining $2500 kept back (totaling $22,500). That is paid out in three installments of $7500 over the summer.
But a look at her paystubs would show all this, and in particular the summer pay is not listed as salary.
In reality its about 2 months total as they usually have to stay a week after school lets out and start going back two weeks before it starts again in the fall.
It really hits when you have to take unpaid FMLA. If your contract is for, say, 185 days, each day you miss costs you 1/185 of your salary, not the 1/240 or whatever most salaried jobs assume. So if you miss a over a month, you actually get a negative paycheck.
We also don’t get the option to restructure our pay, we have to take 12 checks. So basically we all give an interest free loan to the district each year.
Most districts pay full-time employees year-round. The ones in my area do, anyway.
Some of them moonlight in large part because their teaching job does not pay into Social Security, so they take a second job so they can have enough quarters to get full benefits.
Most teachers I know do get sick days but the issue MandaJo is talking about happens when the paid leave runs out and you have to take unpaid FMLA. To the best of my knowledge, it wouldn’t affect a paycheck where the person was on unpaid FMLA for the whole pay period, as in that case the person wouldn’t be paid at all. It would affect pay periods where there were some days on unpaid FMLA and some paid days - such as someone taking intermittent FMLA ( maybe they need to take one day a week off for some sort of treatment) or someone whose paid sick leave runs out in the middle of a pay period. There are usually around 260 days a year that a full-time salaried worker is paid for ( between days they work, vacation days and holidays - basically every weekday) so that if they run out of paid sick leave three days before the pay period ends, they will have 3 days pay or 3/260 of their yearly salary deducted from that paycheck. Teachers are paid for 185 days , so a teacher loses 3/185 of their yearly salary in the same situation.
Correct except this part. Normally, in a month I work for say, 22 days, but I get paid for 18, and paid for the other 4 on my summer check (or whatever. Numbers approximated)
So if I miss the 22 days, my salary gets docked 22 days salary, so my paycheck goes negative. Plus, my district pays nothing toward my husband and child’s insurance, so that’s another $1200 I owe them for the month.
The flipside is that if I can time my cancer or whatever for summer, I don’t have to take days.
It makes a very big difference that we don’t get paid year round. Keeping some portion of our checks and saying its for our own good is actually pretty insulting.
No, they send them a check year round. But they are paid for the days they work.
If you are exempt from social security and paying into a state retirement system, any social security you are entitled to will be reduced by 2/3 of what your state pension pays. There was a loophole, but they closed it over 10 years ago.
It varies. The (private) school I’m at now just paid for a weeklong online training I did, and would even have paid for travel if I had chosen one of the in-person options instead of the online one (though I decided that, even independent of the cost, traveling was just too much stress that could be avoided).
Though even with generous policies like that, they still were left unable to fill one of their math positions, and had to do some pretty severe schedule shuffles to compensate (including, ironically, canceling the class I was getting the training for).
What about what you paid in before moving to the teacher retirement system? I’m not including it in my retirement calculations, but I would assume I get something from what I paid into SS for 20 years. My pension will be a lot more that what I would get from SS, so if it’s reduced by 2/3 of what the pension paid I’d get nothing.
The 2/3 is actually what your survivor benefits are reduced by. There is a sliding scale for the primary beneficiary. The law in question is the Windfall Elimination Act, and it’s actually really complicated:
I have twenty-five years’ experience teaching the English language. I have a “CELTA,” the standard certificate for working overseas. Now I drive a school bus back in the US.
So my school district sent out a notice saying they needed an English language teacher before school starts at the end of the month. I like my bus gig, but I sent in my stuff out of a spirit of trying to help.
They can’t use me without a Pennsylvania teacher’s certificate.
I think I now understand why they are short teachers.
I’m reading the 4-March issue of Science and found this comment:
(The high school teachers interviewed for this story all opted for private schools, buying, asking other factors, that those jobs asks then to bypass the tube-consuming verification prices many public schools require.)
Obviously loosening requirements doesn’t have to mean sticking a piece of chalk into the hand of anyone who stumbles off the street, but some of these requirements certainly seem counterproductive if some schools are doing fine without them.