My neighbor quit teaching this year and started bartending because she couldn’t pay her bills. My daughter is a teacher and is struggling. She switched to special needs kids to get away from the abuse and bullying from the kids.
I realize this is several years old but it’s just gotten worse.
Just saw an advertisement for a manager of a fast-food place that pays twice as much as for a first-year teacher.
And they don’t even offer you tenure in the sense that college professors have.
And a bartender doesn’t have to pay for the booze to serve to the customers.
I taught for several years at a military prep school, getting paid as an active duty Navy officer. It was one of the most rewarding jobs in my life, and I was good at it, being recognized as “Science Instructor of the Year” one year and “Instructor of the Year” the following year.
I thought about teaching when I got out of the service, but the abysmal pay dissuaded me. For example, I was looking at earning less than half of what I was making in the service for twice the teaching load. So I switched to an engineering career instead.
Totally agree with the OP. It’s somewhat better elsewhere, though not by huge leaps and bounds. Here in Ontario the average public school teacher salary is about $77K, and they have a strong union without wingnut Republican types trying to dismantle it, and also of course public health care and a really enviable retirement plan.
I think the public school teacher compensation problem in the US is likely related to the same ideological sickness that is always obstructing universal health care – that if the taxpayers funded a really excellent public school system, then “the undeserving” might benefit. And we all know what “the undeserving” is code for, even when they’re just children.
The reality, of course, is that a good basic educational system emphasizing equity and fairness ultimately benefits all of society, but you need to possess at least half a working brain to understand that, and not a half-brain that’s been further corrupted by exposure to Fox News, America’s top #1 news network!
To be fair, that’s not really relevant here. Tenure isn’t explicitly about job security, tenure at the college level is about academic freedom and the right to pursue research in potentially controversial issues. And it’s not unlimited. A tenured professor can be dismissed as a result of formal hearings.
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I think it’s relevant but I suppose I didn’t make the case for that, did I? Let me put it a different way: if you’re going to pay me that little to teach public school, I want some authority to create the lesson. Not without guidelines and goals but some academic freedom to construct the course. I didn’t mean about job security.
Teacher Pay is all over the place (literally), there’s a podcaster I follow who’s making something like $100k a year teaching for Los Angeles Unified School District with a four year degree but not an actual teaching degree.
I live in Luxembourg, and I feel like my kids are getting a good-quality education. It starts with the teachers, and we pay our teachers very well.
It’s obviously not an apples-to-apples comparison, looking at our salaries versus the US (or anywhere else). We’re a very small country, with a high per-capita income. In addition, we have a fluency requirement of three languages, minimum, including Luxembourgish, which has essentially zero footprint outside the country. Our teachers need to clear a pretty high educational bar, so we have to offer salaries to match in order to incentivise educators to meet those requirements.
Nevertheless, I’m confident my kids are in good hands in this system. There are a lot of reasons why I plan never to return to the States; healthcare is at the top of the list, but a well-supported educational system is close behind.
My daughter is, IMHO, a very good teacher… or was. Not only can she not afford to live on the pay, she hates hates hates the political mandates coming from above. For example, when she was teaching in Orlando, they were told no child was to ever be given a score below 50%. Period. End of discussion. What kind of stupid rule is that? You don’t deserve points just for existing.
It’s really unfortunate, because I watched her with her students on several occasions and she really is good at it. At least her own children will benefit from a mother who can teach them.
Ah, but a good education system means that people become literate, numerate, capable of logical analysis and critical thought; all things that are completely unacceptable to politicians, especially right wing ones! If people were capable of making good decisions, then the politicians know no one would vote for them! Everyone would turn into “elite college liberals”.
I saw an article a week or so ago about Danielle Smith complaining that if liberals actually believed in equality, then college campuses should have equal levels of liberal and conservative subjects and teachers.
It doesn’t work that way, Danielle.
Education is one of the greatest gifts a society can give itself, but too many people would prefer to control rather than collaborate. It sucks.
Okay, I can see instructors coming in these two flavors, but “subjects”? Is there a conservative version of algebra? A liberal version of computer science?!?
“2x + 5 = 13. Solve for x.”
“x = America!”
“Show your work.”
“(brandishes handgun)”
“Excellent. A plus.”
Teacher Burnout Statistics: Why Teachers Quit in 2024
Over 40% of new teachers quit before year 5.
I agree with most of the thread, but this rule is actually pretty solid. It has to do with the motivational effects of a single zero, versus the motivational effects of a single 50%.
A mediocre student who scores a 70% and a 75% has a score of 73% in a class-- a C in most circumstances. If the student gets a zero, their score drops to 48%. Another 75% raises their score to 55, and another 75% raises their score to 59–still a failing grade. It’s very difficult to come back from the zero, and often kids won’t try.
If the student instead got a 50%, their grade drops from a 73% to a 65%, a D. This is much easier to recover from, and students can be more easily motivated to make the work to come back from this.
Of course, the deeper problem is that our letter grade/percentage grade mashup is a terrible way to provide meaningful feedback. It’s certainly not used in the “real world,” which in other ways is a lot more cutthroat; and it makes it very difficult for students to know how they can improve.
But I’m all about the change to give students a minimum of 50% (with possible exceptions for students who don’t turn in the assignment at all, or who turn in something with less than 1% of the effort they should’ve expended).
In my own school, we’ve seen 20-50% turnover for the past three years. It’s been absolutely devastating. I live in an area with a North Carolina-level salary and a New England-level cost of living, and the difference between the two makes it very difficult to motivate teachers and other education workers to stay in the schools. Couple that with a huge ramp-up in vouchers for private schools (with almost no oversight), and unfettered growth in charter schools (with very little oversight), and it starts to look a lot like the legislature is trying to dismantle public schools.
But does a 50% mean students pass for doing failing work? I’m all for considering circumstances and psychology, but at some level you need to manage the bare minimum.
That is how you can graduate high school without learning to read. I’d much rather have a safety net to help failing students without shaming them, but that’s probably even more politically toxic.
No. They must do passing work to pass. But one failing grade doesn’t doom their effort to pass.
Consider if instead of the percentage-to-grade system, assignments were graded on a scale of 0-6, with 0 meaning “not turned in,” and 6 meaning “A.” Check out how the math works then. Would that be an outrageous system that would reward failure?
There’s no evidence showing that a switch to “minimum 50%” has led to anyone graduating high school without learning to read.
Not thst I know of, but there is evidence that some functional illiterates are high school graduates. I don’t know how it happens, though.
My point was that an inaccurate assessment feels good but has knock-on effects. The problem it’s trying to solve has other solutions. There’s no point in assigning numbers or grades if only some have meaning; otherwise, 50 = 0 and 100 = 100, so all you’ve done is redefine zero and halve the range.
The consensus among my daughter’s peers about the Orlando policy was that it would keep their overall percentages higher, so they could brag about that and retain grants or funding or something. I agree a single zero shouldn’t be a death knell for a student - we all have bad days, and many teachers allow for that by dropping the worst grade every term. But if you don’t do the work, you don’t deserve 50% just for having a pulse.
For those of you with personal experience, I would love to hear the actual statistics. I was fooling around on Indeed looking at the salaries on job postings a few weeks ago, but I live in an area where the cost of living is high, and the salaries I saw were probably higher than in most areas.
Here’s what I’m wondering:
(1) What salary was the teacher offered
(2) What was the actual position (e.g., pre-school teacher, 8th grade science teacher at a private school, special education teacher, etc.)
(3) What geographic area
(4) What’s the difference, pay-wise, between a new teacher and one with a lot of experience? Does the teacher get an annual pay increase, or does the teacher need to look for a new job to get more money?
And just to be clear, I’m sure teachers are paid poorly, I’m not questioning that general premise. Just wondering specifically what that means. The article in the OP provided some statistics, but – aside from it being six years old – the specific statistics are for West Virginia and Oklahoma, which I seriously doubt are representative of most places in the country.