My wife’s daughter is also a teacher. She was considering quitting but decided to get a Master’s online. It actually worked out for her (comparatively speaking) as she did get a raise. Of course, this is somewhat offset by the cost of the degree. This is CA, btw.
I’m not understanding, are you referring to the children?
Seems like if varies quite a bit even within states.
Where I live (Ohio) the starting pay is about what I would start out at as an environmental scientist (I was told by a teacher in my neighborhood it was $35K-$40K).
I pay $100/year for school supplies (in addition to pencils/markers/glue/kleenex/cleaning supplies that I buy at the beginning of the year). There are 24 kids in the class so supposedly $2400 for supplies.
Teachers get 16 weeks off per year (11 weeks in summer, spring break, fall break, Thanksgiving week, Christmas break, plus other holidays). There are also 5 “teacher in service” days where the kids are not in school but the teachers work.
At least in my area it seems like a pretty good gig. If you like children and like to teach-which I don’t. And you’re willing to put up with asshole parents-which I’m not.
I mean, I’m obviously gonna blame politicians that freeze teacher pay, rework the pay schedule to make sure that veteran teachers spend ten years without a raise, remove master’s pay, remove retirement benefits for new teachers, remove instructional assistants at younger grades, attack teacher unions as “thugs,” force us to censor our libraries so that kids won’t see examples of gay families in their literature, and funnel huge amounts of money to private schools, including nastily bigoted schools. The argument that “most people are stupid morons” doesn’t really hold water. It’s the politicians.
Yes, but it’s the stupid morons who vote for these politicians and keep them in office.
Is this time off (vacation) or time off from teaching (but still working time: lesson planning, professional development, etc.)?
I ask because I only teach 26 weeks a year (university: more if I’m teaching in summer), but there’s quite a LOT of work happening at other times, and most of the rest is definitely not “off”! It’s a pretty common misconception for teachers that not teaching = vacation, and I don’t know how true it is for K–12 teachers. I do know that working a side job is taking away from time that could be spend on teaching preparation, which is a HUGE part of teaching.
It is unpaid whatever it is. When I first started teacher, we got no paychecks over the summer. We negotiated to get paid year round but each paycheck was our contract salary divided by 26 now instead of 22. Before they made this change, through our teacher credit union they would do this for you by taking a little out of each pay check so they could “pay” you for the two months we were off.
Well I don’t know the details of how the teachers spend their time off. My neighbor and his wife are both teachers. At least in the summer he spends nearly every day at the neighborhood pool with his kids.
I have a friend who is a retired teacher. He said he did a lot of 60 hour weeks without getting overtime pay. He worked in Kentucky.
Every teacher I have talked to has talked about the challenges of dealing with parents more than anything else.
That’s a salary. I get paid a flat rate per year as well. I don’t get paid overtime either, although I work plenty of it.
Just saying that is not unique to teachers.
Exactly. During my first year of teaching, I was working 60-80 hours per week to keep up with lesson preparation (and worksheet/quiz/exam preparation). There were times at 10:00 pm at night when I realized I wasn’t going to finish grading an exam (which I had planned to go over and discuss the following day), and instead had to switch gears and spend 2-3 hours preparing a lesson plan for the next unit.
It got a little better the second year as I adjusted everything to reflect what had worked the previous year and what hadn’t. The third year was better still, other than the fact that I got additional duties like curriculum development coordinator. Then I got a different subject to teach (physics instead of chemistry), and it was just like being a first-year instructor again.
Thanks!
Fewer professors with tenure every year. Much of the college teaching is now done by poorly paid part-timers with no job security whatever. Pretty soon our universities will go down the same hole as our lower schools. The plain fact is that a majority no longer believes in education. And research is a hobby.
Education is a really important priority, and most teachers deserve to be well renumerated. I think it is likely a very rewarding job. But it must be sometimes difficult to manage parental expectations, growing disrespect for authority, deal with school politics, act as a social worker or nurse, and mitigate the unruly. No doubt personal technology has made this harder.
Some of the best teachers I had basically taught the same course and gave similar exams every year. But I’m sure one becomes more efficient with time and experience. A teacher should not have to take on other jobs to make ends meet. I don’t know any teachers who do so in Ontario from fall to spring. Teachers certainly should be well paid enough to attract people who want to do it, and who are smart enough to meet the required standards, and flexible enough to meet the multi-faceted demands of the job.
Isn’t it paid or unpaid, depending on how you want to look at it?
Effectively we are paid for185 days not 255 days like normies are. I agree that line has blurred over the last couple of decades but if we are called into work over the summer we get paid for that.
It really depends on whether or not a teacher enjoys the 16 weeks off.
If a teacher enjoys the 16 weeks off, then they should look at it as a long, paid holiday. If they would rather be working those 16 weeks (and getting extra pay for it), then they should look at it as a long, unpaid holiday.
Every teacher I know seems to love the 16 weeks off. YMMV, of course.
It’s gotten much worse. There was a Bankrate article last September about inflation and how well people’s wages are keeping up with it by profession.
Bankrate’s analysis found that wages for workers in retail, leisure and hospitality, as well as food services and accommodation, never lost ground to inflation, with their wages up 16 percent, 18.9 percent and 19.6 percent since the beginning of 2021 compared to inflation’s 15.8 percent burst, respectively.
Of the industries that have fallen behind, health care and social assistance is keeping up better than any. Up 13.9 percent since the start of 2021, that sector’s pay may fully recover from the total loss of purchasing power quicker than the average worker, based on Bankrate’s Wage To Inflation Index.
Other industries have an even greater pay-to-inflation gap. Manufacturing wages are up a smaller 11.7 percent since the beginning of 2021, while construction pay has risen 11 percent and financial activities pay is up a smaller 10.2 percent. Wages for workers in both public- and private-sector education have risen just 8.6 percent over the period, 7.2 percentage points below the overall rate of inflation.
Being in high ed myself, I was jealous that wages for private sector education rose an average of 8.6% from 2020-23, because our university gave no raises in 2020, a 1.5% raise in 2021, a 4% raise in 2022, and no raises again in 2023…
The difference between 255 days and 185 days for a working year is 70 working days. That’s 14 five-day weeks, not 16.
There’s also the expectation that teachers will work much more than 40 hours per week during the 185 days when school is in session. A 255-day or 51-workweek year at 40 hours per week is 2040 total hours, while a 185-day or 37-workweek year at 55 hours per week is 2035 total hours.
Fifty-five hours per week amounts to five ten-hour workdays and an extra five hours on the weekend. Every schoolteacher I know would be delighted to have that “easy” a work schedule.
So I don’t think you can make a very good case for the fourteen weeks when school isn’t in session being “a long, paid holiday”. What it is is basically a massive amount of accumulated overtime compensation for the extra hours put in during the school year.
Now, I’m not saying I think there’s anything inherently unjust or exploitative about cramming all the working hours into a shorter working year. But teachers are definitely not getting a special perk in terms of their overall job requirements just by having summers “off”.
If many of them enjoy having no teaching duties during the summer, great. But it’s not a “holiday” in the sense of “the total amount of work expected from you is reduced in order to increase your overall leisure-to-work ratio”. They’re making up for that “time off” via longer working hours during the school year.
Can you share where in WA state? Or the county if that’s TMI?
I gave a talk to all our students and one point was “Real Life is Pass/Fail.”
We had graphic design students (college level) giving up and saying “Well, this is good enough for a B minus…”
My point was that you need to push yourself and excel. Only the best are hired, and your future coworkers are going to need you to present A-level work to the clients.
Have them move to Chicago. Teacher salaries here are outstanding. Also, they have a stellar pension. They can retire in their 50s with full pay for the rest of their lives (which can be six figures).
Unions for the win.
