I’ve heard the saying in the original post before. I think it should be looked at by most if not all citizens. I come from a family of teachers and plan to become a teacher myself after I obtain the education to do so. If you think about it there is no more rewarding career than a teacher. Yet they get the least amount of respect. If it were not for the teachers our society could not possibly run as it does currently. Education is the key to independance and peace.
Gazoo, you don’t really want to turn this into a
picky “find the grammatical error” post, do you?
a. strawberriesandcream said that he/she is still in the process of being educated.
b. The topic is teacher salaries, not grammar.
c. Are you trying to make a point that somehow, a person who makes a grammatical error will not make a good teacher? Do you think that’s what teachers do all day–correct people’s grammar?
d. No one’s pointed out your grammatical errors, have they?
If I misunderstood your comment, then I apologize. I would just rather see the original topic continue to be the focus of the thread.
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It is true that a great many people get into the teaching profession because of their love of kids. But there are people who would like to get into the teaching profession who choose other professions solely because they can make more money.
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To compare teachers’ salaries to doctors’ is not a fair comparison. Doctors are required to have 12 years of preparation (4 years college, 4 years med school, 4 years residency). Doctors earn every cent they make.
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The claim has been made that some people go into education because they could not survive in any other major. Evidence? Sure, I knew elementary education majors who struggled through physics, but I also knew physics majors who struggled through English composition and sociology. The average elementary school teacher would make a poor chemist, and vice-versa. This does not neccesarily make one group smarter than the other. It does mean that people with talent in chemistry are more likely to become a chemist than to become a chemistry teacher. Substitue business, or art, or math, in the sentence above, and the argument still holds.
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The argument has been made that lower salaries are good because they attract only the most dedicated people. Fair enough. But the average teacher leaves the profession after 4-5 years. Do you think they are leaving for a lower paying job? And if you increase salaries, you still get those who are most dedicated, but you are more likely to keep them, and are more likely to attract those who have the desire to teach away from more lucrative professions.
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So what would be the effect of higher salaries? It would not necessarily attract better candidates, but it would certainly attract more. As more people apply, you can raise standards for entry into the profession, with a resultant increase in the general talent pool. Lately, the trend has been to raise standards (something I completely agree with) without a commensurate increase in compensation. Thus, the teacher shortage.
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There is always a mixture of good, average, and poor candidates applying for a given job. Compare the two following situations. A. With a relatively low salary, you may get fewer qualified applicants than there are openings (this is happening in districts all over the country). In this case the employer has no choice but to hire all of the qualified candidates, including those they believe will do a poor job. B. If however the salary is high enough to make the job highly attractive, there will be a great many more applicants than there are openings. The employer can eliminate the obviously poor candidates, and pick and choose from the rest. This happens only in the richest districts.
It isn’t just about what teachers deserve, it’s about what can be done to attract and keep the best and brightest in the teaching profession. In this sense, I would say that, yes, “throwing money” at the problem would help it. Yes, it must be spent wisely, but that is true regardless of the level of funding.
I agree with Kyla. I really should have started this in the Great Debates, and I ask the moderator to move it there.
I’ll give it a nudge over the edge. This does have all the characteristics of a GD - at least potentially. 
I would have to say that a good teacher is worth their weight in gold.
Sue should know what teachers make as she works in the school system here. A friend is finishing his fourth year of education here and has offers for $45,000 yr. If they do make $65K their take home after taxes is only going to be around $40K.
A registered nurse here only makes about $50,000 a year before taxes.
When you factor in the importance of teachers and the responsibility required to be a nurse, neither profession could be considered overpaid for what they do. I won’t even get into what persons in Rehabilitation make. Let’s just say we do it because we love people, we definately don’t do it for the money.
"But their number of working hours per year is not that much."
The teachers at our children’s school work from 7am until 5pm Monday through Thursday. That’s a 40 hour work week. With extra curricular activities, school functions, and other related activities like grading and lesson preparation I would estimate that they probably work at least 2 extra hours per day or 8 hrs every week. There’s about twelve weeks of vacation time every year so they end up working 9 months of the year and a month has an average of 4.3 weeks.
So when you do the math you get:
48 hours/wk x 9 months x 4.3 weeks = 1857 hrs / year
A person who works 40 hours a week for 12 months will work 2064 hours. If you take off three weeks (120 hrs) for vacation time you get 1944 hrs / year. There isn’t that much difference in hours worked between the two and I think any teachers here could tell me that they work more than 48 hours a week during the school year.
So much for the argument that teachers don’t put in the hours that other people do.
When I graduated high school (1983) my first year english teacher was making $35,000 (Cdn) a year. With salary increases I estimate she could expect to average at least $50,000 per year over her career. She was a really good teacher, she had to be to put up with myself and the maniacs I called friends.
My english teacher weighed 120 pounds which converts to 1920 ounces. With gold trading at $400.00 an ounce it looks like she’d be worth $768,000 at today’s gold prices. If she averages $50,000/yr over a 40 year teaching career she will earn 2 million dollars. I heard once that the average person will earn a million dollars in their lifetime so 2 million dollars doesn’t sound too shabby when you look at it that way.
Apparently, good teachers are worth more than gold. It is a pity that they are not regarded as highly in other regions.
The problem, as I see it, tends to be not so much a problem with overall teacher salaries, but in the disparity amongst teacher salaries. Just looking here you can see salaries all over the board. I have my own personal example.
My fiancee has a Bachelors Degree, secondary education - English. After graduation she spent 6 months taking over maternity leave for a teacher, at the school where she student taught. During this time she was told repeatedly that she was basically guaranteed a position there at the end of the year. I think you can see where I am going with this. They did not offer her a contract, and only informed her of this in late May. Because of this, she did not have time to find a position, and has been out of teaching for a year and a half. Her problem in getting a new job is simply this. Where we used to live we were surrounded by top flight schools, none of whom would take someone of such low experience. So she could teach in the inner-city public school, but the pay is so low and the job so thankless, she didn’t want to take that position either. So she is sticking around her admin job until she finds something specific. It pays significantly more than an inner-city teaching job would pay, which is just not right.
The fact is she shouldn’t have to choose between 40 in the suburbs and 25 in the city, if anything the city should pay more because of the difficulties in teaching there. But because they can’t pay fairly, they only draw the desprate and the untalented. It’s really pretty sad.
As you can see, I do not have an English degree 
Getting rid of most of the school boards and their salaries would go a long way to getting teachers higher pay:D
I am currently a high school student, and from experience, I would have to say that we don’t pay teachers nearly enough (Feel free to go on strike anytime you want;))
[ul]
[li]My teachers work their buts off. Expecially Stolz if she’s reading this[/li][li]Teaching is not a 6 day 10 month job a year. My teachers spend much of their time after school and during weekends and vacations grading papers and tests as well as making lesson plans for the upcoming school days.[/li][li]Teachers, expecially but not exclusivly elemtary school teachers, play a big role in shaping the way a child will turn out as an adult. A good teacher could cultivate an interest or self esteem while a bad teacher could destroy one.[/li][/ul]
I am currently a high school student, and from experience, I would have to say that we don’t pay teachers nearly enough (Feel free to go on strike anytime you want)
[ul]
[li]My teachers work their buts off. Expecially Stolz if she’s reading this.[/li][li]High school teachers put up with a lot of $*@#[/li][li]Teaching is not a 5 day a week, 10 month a year job. My teachers spend much of their time after school and during weekends and vacations grading papers and tests as well as making lesson plans for the upcoming school days.[/li][li]Teachers, expecially but not exclusivly elemtary school teachers, play a big role in shaping the way a child will turn out as an adult. A good teacher could cultivate an interest or self esteem while a bad teacher could destroy one.[/li][/ul]
I could go on forever listing the qualities which indicate that good teachers are UNDERPAID they play such a big role in the lives of their students, and are often underapreciated.
Oh…and for all the teachers out there who are reading this, don’t think that I am writing this just to kiss some teacher’s butt, my mom teaches (Nursery school) works her but off, and she dosen’t even have to grade papers, so I can only immagine what middle and high school teachers have to do.
I can think of only one reason to continue to pay teachers their current sallary. If teachers made as much as doctors or lawyers…then people would go into teaching for the money, and not because they truly care for children (though with some of my teachers, it’s hard to belive that that was their motivation) and want to teach.
If y’all think regular full-time teachers’ salaries are too low, wait’ll you see what kind of diddly-squat substitute teachers make. Bleah.
And substitutes seem so much happier:) Of course they are glorified baby sitters.
Except for one all the teachers I have had that actually worked really hard I have found that teachers work too hard, to no actual benefit. Its entirely up to the teacher how much he or she works. They don’t have to do that extra stuff and its basically babysitting.
I would love to teach. If I had a choice of any job in the world, it would be to be a high school science teacher.
HOWEVER…
I’m not going to become a teacher. At least, not as of this posting I’m not. I do believe that people should do what they love, and fortunately, I have a few other occupations in mind that I would love to do, and that would not leave me broke as hell as a result. I guess you could say that I am one of those who would be lured back to the teaching profession by a raise of salaries. Call me superficial, call me a betrayer of my ideals; I prefer to think of myself as a realist.
It’s pretty unfair. I completely agree with the saying that you get what you pay for. We expect so much out of our teachers and they are the first to be blamed when things go wrong at school, but yet we can’t even seem to compensate them for what is pretty much universally acknowledged as one of the most important professions ever. I think that the fact that we place so much responsibility on the teachers shoulders when things go wrong betrays exactly how important they are in society, but you would hardly know it based on what they are paid.
I suppose I could always combat the unfairness in my own way and go ahead and teach, but I’d rather not. I guess I just think the salary paid to teachers is pretty indicative of how much respect they receive from society in general. Like someone said earlier, A Rod gets $25 million a year for throwing a stupid ball around a park. Sports heroes are practically gods.
It’s a damn shame that we do not have our priorities in place as a nation.
Haven’t you heard? This is the way things were done in the good old USSR. Equal pay for all work, all work being equally important to the Motherland. We should all strive to live up to this paragon of equality.
[celestina popping 2 Aleve and massaging her temples]
All the math in this thread is making my head hurt!
Asmodean said:
“Getting rid of most of the school boards and their salaries would go a long way to getting teachers higher pay”
Yes, but I would like to add that you still need some body to reside over and make decisions for schools. I’d say make that governing body full of EXPERIENCED TEACHERS, those who have taught and continue to teach. We can send all those superintendents, other school board people, and some parents too back to the classroom, pay them what teachers earn now, and let them see firsthand what’s going on.
While I support the idea of paying teachers a decent, livable salary–I’d really like to splurge and eat something besides Ramen noodles–I still think what really needs to be done is to have more support for teachers, more discipline of students on the parts of their parents, and more awareness of what’s going on in the public school system and activism for VIABLE SOLUTIONS on the parts of the American public in general in order to fix the mess in public schools. It’s not just the teacher’s problem if schools fail to turn out productive citizens; it’s the American public’s problem. Those people who are so quick to blame teachers, really need to take a good look in the mirror.
I was a teacher for 6 years and left the profession mainly because of salary. There were other reasons but the main one was salary.
To address one point: Why are teachers paid so little?
There are several reasons:
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A position that can easily be replaced will be paid less than one that is difficult t replace. In the job I have now, I was the only qualified applicant that applied. There were 3 other applicants total and 2 lived in Thialand! Also, if they wanted to replace me and they could find a qualified applicant, it would take 2-3 months minimum for them to even get going. All this time, the business would be struggling without my help or the could farm it out at obsenely high prices (which is what they did before I started at a run rate of $220,000 per year!). Teachers? They can be replaced with another teacher in a VERY short time.
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Any position whos work benefits many will be payed less then one whos work benefits few or one. It is very important to have the best lawyer when up on a murder charge or the best doctor for open heart surgery (benefits one not many) than a journalist (or teacher) whose work benefits many.
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Any position in which incompetence is found quickly will pay more than if it can be hidden. In my current job, if I screwed up, there would be immediate ramifications resulting in my company losing clients, losing standing in the industry etc. Teaching? John didn’t become a doctor because of poor teaching…who’s to know? The results of bad teaching are delayed and maybe never even discovered.
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Really a subpoint, but any position in which an experienced person can be replaced with an inexperienced one will pay less. A teacher with 20 years of experience can be yanked and someone with 0-3 put in with no apparent harm. (see point above)
I need to go, but if anyone is interested in my views, I will respond.
Blink
The surgeon you speak of may only operate on one person at a time, but over the course of her year’s work, she will operate on hundreds of people. An emergency room doctor, thousands. Most attourneys will have dozens of clients over the course of a year. I teach 32 students a year. Since my work benefits a smaller number of people, I should be paid more (by your theory).
Ah, but you were talking about the number of people benefitted at one time. When Bruce Springsteen sells out a stadium, his work (rock music) is benefitting 50 or 60 thousand people at once, and makes more in one night than I do in a year. Bill Gates is a billionaire because his work benefits tens of millions of people all at the same time.
The average major league baseball player makes over a million dollars a year. The league minimum is $200,000. To paraphrase–Major league ball players? They can be replaced with another baseball player in a VERY short time. There are hundreds of players ready and eager to take the place of any major leaguer who would step down. Suppose you were to replace the 25th man on the Yankees making 200 grand with a talented AAA player. Does this reduce the Yankees chances of making the playoffs at all? Unlikely.
The ease with which someone can be replaced is really a side issue anyway. In some places, teachers are easily replaced, yes, but the real issue is what is lost when such a replacement is made. Using my baseball analogy (“Any issue that can’t be discussed using a baseball analogy isn’t worth discussing” Arthur Saltzman, one of my college professors) the Yankees could easily replace Roger Clemens with a rookie, but his replacement would in all probablility not perform at the same level as The Rocket. I maintain that the loss of a talented teacher who is replaced by an incompetent one causes just as much harm to the school and its students as a journeyman replacing Roger Clemens. More on this in a moment. But first . . .
Of course experienced teachers who retire or leave for another job are replaced by less experienced teachers. This is true of every profession. Replace the word “teachers” with any other occupation or profession, and it remains true. Experienced doctors who retire are usually replaced by less experienced doctors. The same is true of nurses, carpenters, plumbers, lawyers, machinists, welders, etc. Every profession has to replace experienced people sometime, and the replacements usually have less experience. If this weren’t true, nobody would ever be able to get a job in the first place.
It is easy to spot incompetence in ditch-digging. If the ditch isn’t dug on time, isn’t straight, deep enough, etc. it’s easy to spot. Likewise, running a cash register at McDonald’s. Can’t count change, drawer is constantly short, rude to the customers, drops things on the floor, all easy to spot. In both cases above, incompetence is easy to spot and has a detrimental effect on the business. But these are low paying jobs because they have low, easily met qualifications.
What I take most issue with is your assertion that the results of bad teaching are hard to spot. I can spot bad teaching quite easily. And the effects can be immediate and profound. A first grader who isn’t taught to read will struggle in 2nd grade (and probably 3rd, 4th, etc.)–an immediate, negative consequence, and one that can be devastating to the child and her family. Try consulting with a mother whose child is struggling every day in school because she hasn’t learned to read well and you will see, in the child and her mother, the severe, short-term effects of bad teaching.
The reason teachers are not paid more is simple. Public school teachers are paid by tax dollars, and taxpayers are unwilling to pay them more.
Look at the recent history of public schools.
In the 19th century, teachers typically had a only high-school education, but the job paid so little that the teacher would usually live in the school or with a sponsor family.
In the 20th century, it was recognized that teachers, even in grammar schools, needed specialized training, and the teacher’s college, a two year institution, was born. Most teachers had two years of post-secondary training, and the job paid a little better. The requirements continued to grow, but salaries did not grow as quickly. Part of the reason is that public school teaching was percieved as a “woman’s” job, and indeed, most teachers were women. It was acceptable to pay women less, it was reasoned, because women did not have to support a family. Single women had to support only themselves, and married women were only supplying a second income for the family. This reasoning also tended to keep nurses salaries low.
It was also a self-supporting myth: Men could not support a family on a teacher’s salary, so they avoided the profession, which kept it predominantly female, which lent support to the idea that it was ok to pay teachers less, and so on.
But requirements have continued to rise faster than salaries. Most states require post-bachelors classes, and some already have the requirement of a Masters’ degree for a continuing (permanent)credential (Missouri and California, for example).
This has led to a disparity between educatiional requirements and compensation. And it is causing a problem. There is already a teacher shortage in this country, and it will be getting continually worse. Most states have emergency credential programs because there are fewer teachers than there are jobs. My own district starts each year with dozens of teachers teaching with such a credential because there are not enough qualified teachers.
What this means is:
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Students being taught by teachers who have never taken an education class.
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Bad teachers being retained becaused there is no one to replace them.
Would increasing teacher salaries improve education? I have already argued elsewhere that it would, but let me quote that argument here:
The issue is not why salaries are low, that’s a simple one, but what effect low salaries have on the education system and the 90%+ of the population that depends on it.
Anyone who wants to increase teacher and administrator salaries is feted as a hero by the teachers’ unions.
Anyone who wishes to measure teacher performance and tie it to salaries is attacked as a monster by the teachers’ unions.
An education degree is not worth nearly as much as a technical degree such as engineering. This is because a) it isn’t nearly as hard to get, and b) it doesn’t really teach all that much. I have a BS in education, and I can attest that education courses don’t teach how to teach.
No, I am not a teacher. But you don’t need a degree in education to be an effective teacher.
And the idea that a teacher, or group of teachers, who are earning $48,000 a year (average overall salary in my school district) will significantly improve by adding $5,000 to their salaries is not a sound one.
We can certainly raise teacher salaries. But unless we use objective measures to track performance, and compensate the better performers more than the poorer ones, more money will have no effect.
How about giving standardized tests at the end of every school year? Then pay the teacher a set amount based on the amount of improvement his or her students show over last year’s test. This amount could be adjusted by geographic region, the socio-economic average of the students’ background, and other factors.
Regards,
Shodan
Number Six,
First of all, I used to be a teacher and left teaching mainly because of the pay, so I have sympathy.
To elaborate further:
Experienced being replaced by inexperienced: Yes, a doctor and other professions are replaced all the time but what I was getting at was that if you replace an extremely competent heart surgeon with someone inexperienced to operate on me, I may DIE. This is a result people tend to notice. If you replace an experienced teacher with someone incompetent, almost everyone will not notice. Sure, it would be terrible for the students and the school, but to Joe taxpayer? Nah.
My one vs many: If your work benefits many, you will TEND to be paid less. This is because many will need to pay your salary and, like journalism, I am not willing to pay more for my newspaper in order to support local journalists because I don’t see the benefit. I DO benefit, but the benefit is spread over many people while if I’m up on a murder charge, a good lawyer only benefits me and will determine how I spend the rest of my life – so I’m willing to shell out the big bucks which goes directly to the lawyer.
If you combine benefiting many with easily replaced, you get low salaries. Baseball players are not a good example because they are not easily replaced. 1% better on the field may make the difference between going all the way while a 1% better teacher will be mostly unnoticable.
There are more reasons teachers are low paid:
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People who don’t benefit directly pay most of the bill. Childless, older with grown children, etc. people pay property tax for education. They don’t DIRECTLY benefit (I know, I know, many arguments that they indirectly benefit) so they just want to keep costs low and don’t care about quality so much. If only parents footed the bill, they would most likely take more of a role.
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Education degrees are a disaster. I know, I used to teach college and it is the norm that math edec degree seekers don’t even take many (if any at all) junior level math courses, let alone senior level. The courses that would count for a B.S. degree in math. I helped a couple of Biz ed majors and it was the same. Education degrees are way to watered down and they attact the low end of the college class. A stat I heard while teaching was that 50% of teachers graduate in the lowest 25% of the college class (sorry, no cite, and its 10 years old now anyway).
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Teaching is not governed by their own. You cannot be promoted to higher and higher levels of teaching and do significantly higher level tasks. If you want to get ‘promoted’, then you almost need to leave classroom teaching and their is no ‘promotion path’.
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Teaching is a part time job. I know this one used to drive me nuts because I would hear it when I was teaching but it is true/appearance is true. The appearance is that teachers get huge amount of vacation days and they do! No amount of explaining that teachers work 12 hour days and doing math to show teachers work close or at 40 hrs*52 weeks a year will cut it because most people actually have to show up those 52, 40 hour weeks and many times work over 40 hours while getting only 10 days(!) off while they see teachers get off 70-80. So, saying you put in your 2080 hours per year will just get you a ‘yeah, right’ from the public. Teaching needs to become a full time, 52 weeks a year position in order to lose this very powerful, low salary argument.
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Someone mentioned that teaching is tax funded resulting in lower pay.