Study says teachers are not underpaid

Great Debates
1

A recent article by an economist has made the claim that teachers are not underpaid, relative to other professions. This is sure to provoke a firestorm on both sides of issue. For example, here in Madison, WI we just had a referendum pass today (narrowly) for an additional levy of $12 million, largely for personnel expenses.

The study says that techers are paid more per hour than accountants, biological and life scientists, registered nurses, and editors and reporters, and significantly more than social workers and artists. Only lawyers and judges make more out of the groups studied.

My own opinion on this is that it seems that teachers are paid adequately. I know several teachers here in the Madison area, and they all make 45-55k, which seems fair. On top of that are the benefits, work day, and time off. As I have gotten older, I have come to value time off more and more. I know I would trade quite a bit of salary for 3 months off every year, as would many.

To clarify, I am NOT disparaging teachers in any way. They do an important job (probably the most important job) and get a lot of grief from the people that should be backing them up the most (parents). Perhaps the 8 teachers I know are atypical, but they seem to do an awful lot of complaining about how bad they’ve got it, esp when it comes to money. Undoubtably, I am a bit biased as I am (or was) one of those lowly life scientists who began his career, with a BS degree, at $9/hr. ~$50k seems pretty reasonable compared to that

Now, hopefully this won’t turn into a pit worthy pissing match, but does anyone care to comment? I would especially like to hear from Doper teachers on this one.

2

From viewing my sister (i.e., my argument is purely anecdotal) I have noticed:

  1. There is a VAST amount of work that has to be done during a teachers off hours, especially if the teacher is involved in extra-curricular activities.
  2. A number of teachers feel compelled to use their own money to supplement equipment and other teaching aids that are not provided by the school.
3

After reading the article, it definitely doesn’t take into account any “off-time” work that the teacher does. When do these people think that teachers grade tests? During class?

4

Well, I’m a teacher’s kid and work with schools. The Washington Post had a good article on the study in today’s paper (which I’m too lazy to link to).

Yes, teachers have a shorter work day and year, but the scheduled hours don’t include time spent at home correcting papers, etc. You may also want to ask your teacher friends how many of them work another job during the summer.

Here’s another way of thinking about teacher salaries:

So a fourth grade teacher makes $45,000 a year for working 190 days, 7 hours per day. And let’s say that they have 20 students in his or her class.

So $45,000 divided by 190 days = $237 a day in pay.

And $237 a day divided by 20 kids = $12 per kid, per day.

And for that $12 the teacher has to teach reading, writing, geography, history, appropriate social behavior, help special education kids, do recess and lunch duties, be answerable to 20+ parents, ensure each kids safety, teach them to pass the Federal and district tests, deal with all the “Lord of the Flies” stuff of childhood, be answerable to the principal and assistant principal, serve on committees, and grade 20 papers for any assignment.

Would you pay me $12 a day for the next 12 years to teach your kid (everything)?

Whislepig

  1. If you want to keep a good pulse on what’s happening in education, go to educationweek.com and fill out the form for the daily news summary. It’s a great, unbiased site.

  2. Another way of thinking about this is - How much per day do you pay for child care for kids who are not in school or for afterschool care? How much does that work out to per year for the childcare provider, who is probably not required to have a college degree?

5

The biggest problem with one-size-fits-all declarations such as the linked article are that there is simply not one size that fits all.

I live in (the poorest neighborhood in) an affluent community where the teachers make a decent living. I’ve seen the Ohio-wide studies of salaries, and there are a lot of school districts where teachers do not make nearly as much.

Many large urban school districts pay what would appear to be a very competitive wage, yet they suffer from high rates of burn-out and early withdrawals, so are they really being paid “enough”?

It is also true that some median group of history or English teachers are probably getting as good an income as they could hope for outside education, given their specific training. However, there are a lot of math and science teachers who pack it in to go work for private industry in engineering, and in biological and chemical labs because they tire of struggling on 3/4 or 2/3 of what they could make based on their education.

(Just for the sake of argument, it would be interesting to know whether the study in the linked article considered a teacher’s work day to extend from 8:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., or whether it included the extra hour a day that many spend performing in-school preparation and clean-up, as well as the two to four hours a day devoted to lesson plans, grading papers, and assorted activities.
The “three months off” always sounds better before one starts subtracting the continuineducation requirements than must be wedged into that period to maintain certification.)

I have known some rather lazy teachers for whom the job was a sinecure, but the majority of teachers I’ve known are not overpaid by any reasonable measure.

6

Whistlepig, the other way to look at your numbers is that it works out to be $33 per hour.

7

Starting pay here is 23,000/year (state min.)w/ $1000 a year raise after 5 years. Granted, some school districts pay more. Usually whatever the cost of living increase is for the particular region.
I could drive to the closest “large” city and get about 6 or 8 $K more per year. It’s an hour drive one way.

I could work here at a job that pays a little more than poverty level and w/ the raises over the next twenty years, still be making less than a decent salary for someone with several years of college.

I no longer teach school. :frowning:

I can make more money doing practically anything else. I’m back into construction for now anyway. I’m not greedy and do not require a huge salary. But the years I taught put me in the poor house.

BTW I enjoyed working with the students and have been told often what an excellent teacher I was. I taught grades 6 - 12 ALL subjects plus special ed. at the local alternative school. Most of the time I would have twenty or so teenagers who were no longer able to attend school on campus for various reasons.

Most were considered “bad” kids, troublemakers. That’s bullshit IMHO, most just needed some one-on-one and a person whom they could trust. Add to that some discipline and respect. In a short time, the recidivism rate deceased and the grades improved to the point that many were making the honor roll. It’s a damned shame these kids aren’t worth more to the politicians.

I was making peanuts and doing the toughest job, while an administrator I could name sat on his ass making in excess of 100K per year. It’s politics all the way and I got tired of fighting the bastards.

Anyway, I digress, you think teachers are paid “adequately”. You also say they do probably the “most important” job. So, do you then feel that we should pay jobs of less importance more than jobs considered to be MOST important. The city pays its sanitation workers MORE than its teachers!

If you want better employees, you usually have to pay a little better than the next guy. The same applies here…

8

Very true.

But look at the responsibilities and liabilities.

Would you take $33 to look after 20 fourth graders for one hour?

Would you willing to spend the day with 20 high school students for $237? And teach them? Make sure that they don’t beat each other up, call each other names, report the ones who “may” be on drugs?

And education is becoming an increasingly litiginous field. Although it’s rare that individual teachers are sued, suits against districts are increaslingly common.

I’m just saying, how many jobs (even for $33 an hour) require you to be responsible for 20 human beings at one time, do more than serve them hamburgers, AND you are expected to make them learn something?

Whistlepig

9

Is this the part where someone mentions tenure?

10

Go ahead and tell us what you mean.

11

I don’t know about all school districts, but we were required to be at school by 7:30 and could not leave until 4:30. There were no 7 hour work days. Many teachers would stay late and prepare lessons or grade papers rather than take them home like most did. Another couple of hours that most people are unaware of.

Add to that, weekends, continued education, etc. BTW teachers are not paid for NOT working in the summer. They have their salaries garnished during the year and returned in the summer as a regular paycheck.

Plus, if a teacher is out and requires a substitute they often have to pay the substitute out of their OWN paycheck. The school will only cover for a few days if the teacher is out. The rest comes out of our paycheck.

12

Okay, long time lurker, but I’ve got to chime in on this one.

I’m married to a 2nd grade teacher, so I know full well the out of school hours devoted to this profession. First of all, her contract hours are from 7:45 to 3:45, so there is 7.5 hours a day. (30 minutes non-contract lunch). She NEVER (unless family issues arise) comes home before 5 p.m., so there is at least an extra hour per day. Many, many days I will see her at 6 or 7 p.m. due to meetings, planning for extra projects, etc. Now add in the extra hour or two per weekend (minimum) grading papers, writing up plans, returning parents phone calls, emails, letters, etc…You get the idea.

Don’t get me started on the amount of money we spend on the classroom out of our personal budget. If we’re lucky, we’ll get $100 from the PTO per year to offset some costs. Just tomorrow, we’re (myself included) doing a mass craft project for all of the 2nd grade classes and have spent 17.90 on tomorrows events (Our personal funds paid for this). Plus the snacks and presents for parent volunteers, books for her classroom library (the school only gives the BAREST set of books for the kids and I mean only a class set of instructional materials), supplies for additional projects and we can easily spend 500-1000 dollars a year on her class.

Add to that the costs of her getting her Masters degree in education (an idiotic requirement courtesy of the idiotic State of Oregon, thank you very much. Some of which will be reimbursed if they don’t kick that out of the contract this year.) And you can see that it is quite the involved career. It is HARDLY the 8-3, summers and all holidays off slack-fest that the anti-education people constantly harp about.

This also doesn’t include any classes she needs to take in the summer to keep up her credential and career path, or in-services she might attend or teach (granted she will be paid for these if school required or sponsored).

I myself work a straight 40 hour week with 10 holidays a year and 4 weeks vacation. No overtime, very straightforward. I calculated out the hours she put in last year with all of the above and compared it to the hours I work in a year. It turned out she worked about 10 hours less last year than I did.

Did I mention that she’s been teaching for 10 years and makes $36,000 a year?

I will be the first to admit that my wife is probably in the top 5% of all teachers in her school as far as dedication to her job goes. There are quite a few teachers who work quite a bit less than her, but to almost a person, they all share the same dedication to a career that is often belittled, bashed and under appreciated.

I’ll get off my soap-box now, but to those who simply say that education has all the money they need and that teachers are lazy, please go volunteer in an elementary or high-school classroom for a week and talk to the teachers. I think you’ll find that your opinions might be changed.
Mark (proud husband of a teacher)

13

Hey, I’d much rather teach a class full of children than have to root around in filth all day. Sanitation workers make a good salary, and I don’t begrudge them one cent of it.

That said, I think teachers should be paid more (on the whole), if only to attract better applicants.

14

Is their some implication here that teachers work unpaid overtime, and that no one else does?

15

I’m sure there a regional difference in teacher pay, demand, etc.

The best way to determine if teachers are over or underpaid is to look at supply and demand. If there are more qualified applicants than opennings, then teachers are not underpaid and are possibly overpaid. If there are a dearth of qualified teachers for the number of opennings, then teachers are not overpaid and are possibly underpaid. (The cite in the OP does address this, but seems to imply that it’s hard to determine if applicants are actually qualified. I find this hard to accept. It’s done in every proffession I’ve ever worked in.)

Doing comps of similar jobs does help guage things and put them in perspective, but bottom line is that teaching is a job like any other job and is subject to the laws of supply and demand. Looking only at comps assumes there is some absolute “equitable pay” that is divorced from the real world where people make decisions about careers for any number of reasons.

It also helps to look at population projections if you want to look out a few years. If school age kids are on the increase, then it’s quite possible that what looks like a stable supply of teachers could turn into a shortage in the future, and vice versa. Again, this is likely to vary considerably from region to region, so making a blanket statement about whether teachers are over or under paid for the country as a whole can be pretty meaningless.

16

Teacher’s don’t work “overtime” because that is not part of their contract. Teachers are paid a salary, not an hourly wage.

“Overtime” is a term that refers to time worked in excess of scheduled or scheduled paid hours. Being paid a salary means getting paid for a certain amount of hours, but there is no monetory or compensatory differential for hours worked outside of those in contract.

And in response to “tenure”:

Attaining tenure means that after working for a specified period of time, an employee may not be fired/released without just cause. That is not uncommon for professionaly positions. Many professional positions have a 6 to 12 month “probationary period” in which the employee may be released from the position without a reason given.

Many school districts have a three to five year employment period required before an teacher obtains tenure. Once obtaining tenure, an employee my only be fired/released for “just cause”.

Again, this is not unusual for professional occupations in which employees work under contract or are members of a union.

For teacher who have not yet obtained tenure, it is not unusual to receive a notice that you will be layed off, unless a local mill levy passes. Doesn’t matter how well you have done your job, until the next year’s budget is figured out, you MAY be out of a job.

17

I have no beef w/ what sanitation workers earn. I have friends that do this for a living. They earn and deserve every cent. My point was that a teacher’s JOB should surely be considered as important as a sanitation worker’s JOB. The pay should reflect this. I’ll not even get into the cost of college. Nor the impact on our future.

I would dare to say that on average teachers are paid less than they deserve. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
g-nite

18

Very good point.

Nationally, the dearth of teachers are in:

Special education
Foreign languages
Math
Science
Males who teach at the elementary level

Under the requirements of No Child Left Behind, teachers will only be able to teach in their “core” areas. This means that only an Spanish major in Education can teach Spanish.

Federal Education Secretary Rod Paige was recently astounded on a trip to Alaska to find out that in a rural town of 2000 people, with 300 kids in a K-12 school, you may not be able to find 8 different teachers who are certified in:

History
Spanish
French
Math
Science
Special Education
Reading

And he doesn’t even admit that there are still some schools out there with less than 100 students for the entire district.

19

W-pig:

Excellent point about focusing not on “teachers” but on areas of expertise. I completely left that out of my post and it might be an even bigger factor than simple geographic/demographic considerations.

But I don’t buy into the “males needed in elemetary school” concept. It’s unclear to me that men have some genetically determined skills that women don’t have in terms of teaching. I’d worry about a kid entering junior high without ever being exposed to someone who had special training in math or science, for example, but not if they had never experienced having a teacher who happened to be male.

20

The need for more males in elementary schools is an expressed desire by educators, but is based on sociological reasons:

  1. Because more children than ever before are being raised in single female parent familes, having male teachers at the elementary level can provide positive male role models to students that may not be otherwise available.

  2. National M/F ratios for teachers are about:

K-6 = 30% male, 70% female
7-12 = 50% male, 50% female
(This is from memory, but I’d have to dig around for a cite. But for a quick check, pull up the website for your local elementary school and do a gender ratio comparision).

Yes, all teachers must be certified. But there is a quiet, national push to get more males teaching at the elementary level, particularly at the lower grades.

Peace, out.