My cousin is a teacher in Kettering, Ohio. She has a master’s degree. I just looked up her salary on this website: $105K/year in 2022. And she absolutely loves having her summers off. Not a bad gig if you ask me. (Pro-rated, she makes more than me. And I’m an electrical engineer with a master’s degree and 31 years of experience.)
My coworker is a civilian working for the Air Force. His wife is a teacher in the same district as my cousin. She has a bachelor’s degree and makes $72K/year. He said her healthcare plan in incredibly generous. So generous, in fact, that he declined the (federal) healthcare provided by the Air Force and put himself on his wife’s plan.
Of course, many teachers make less. Pay depends on a number of factors, as it should. But whenever I hear someone complain about teacher’s pay, I can’t help but think about my cousin and my coworker’s wife.
Oh, so just like Corporate America, where many of the jobs are either farmed out or are on a temporary basis. Took them a while to catch up. More proof that teachers don’t get an easier gig than Corporate America.
A long time ago (35 years?), I had a debate with someone. They were a union member (one of the construction unions), and they were railing against teachers and teachers unions and tenure. “You can’t fire them!” Um, actually, you can - for cause. Even in Corporate America, you can’t just randomly fire someone - you have to prove cause; it may take a little more for a tenured teacher, but you can. Meanwhile, schools use that as a reason for firing young teachers - if we keep them another year, they get tenure, so we had better get rid of them this year.
In terms of pay, pay needs to be evaluated in terms of supply and demand, lile anythong else. If there is a shortage, the pay is too low. If there is a surplus (of the quality you want) the pay is too high.
There’s no point on discussing what you think people shoild be happy wirh, based on your own assessment of work vs reward.
If a store can’t sell widgets, they are charging too much. It doesn’t matter how irrational they think people are acting.
Let’s put it this way.
I have two master’s degrees in my field. I am board-certified in my field. I have 25 years experience in my field with numerous times I have taken on peer-leadership roles.
In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits. - SOURCE
To be clear, that article is about fifteen years old, and the “rubber rooms” haven’t existed for more than a decade. But NYC has failed to pay the arbitrators, leading to a lot of them quitting, leading to further backlog. And this is all from a 2-year-old Wikipedia article; I’m unable to find anything more current.
It definitely chaps my ass when people are like, “NYC administrators really suck at navigating a dismissal process, and that’s the fault of the teachers and their unions!” It’s completely counterfactual.
Absolutely. I’ve seen it done.
The issue is that the district must follow the contract and the law which often they are loathe to do. Here are two examples:
Under California law, a teacher must be given a PIP early on if they are performing unsatisfactorily. I had to defend a teacher at the end of the year that was going to be fired. I simply said, “You never gave her a PIP as required by state law. You are not firing her.” The principal leaned back in his chair, gave a grin and said OK. No argument, no questions. The fucker knew he was violating the law in firing her and he was hoping he wouldn’t get caught.
There are deadlines when the district must notify you that you are being fired. Well, the district notified the teacher after the deadline so we fought it and won. Teacher turned out to be the best in his department.
So why shouldn’t the union force the district to follow the law & contract?
As I said above to someone: have you met people? Like, do you think that people always do things that make financial sense? Do you think administrators are always competent, and always have the best interests of their organizations at heart?
I did. Not sure why it is on the union to force arbitration in less than 3 years. Their job was to ensure it went to arbitration and if it is taking too long blame the arbiters not the union. Or if the district isn’t happy then have them force the arbiters to speed it up.
Just between you, me, and the ears in the walls, did the teacher deserve to be fired? Was their performance unsatisfactory? And, if so, were they given a PIP soon after?
My wife is on the negotiating committee for her union. School district tried to pass through a $0.10 raise for paraprofessionals. She pointed out that with the state minimum wage going up, over half the paras would be below minimum wage with that increase. Embarrassed the hell out of the district negotiators. Got them to boose starting pay for paras (teacher aids, library aids, etc.) to minimum wage, with a $1 bump next year and keep their longevity add-ons.
Yes, my wife works in a special needs classroom and is (basically) making minimum wage to be bitten, scratched, and peed on on a daily basis. And she loves it.
Agreed, and as @Jasmine posted upthread, we are seeing the lack of supply of teachers in the statistics she quoted. Ergo, teacher pay is too low.
So the result is overcrowded classes and overworked teachers, which hurts students.
It’s interesting (to me, anyway) to compare this to the pay for airline pilots. Historically, lots of people wanted to fly planes for the major airlines. This had the market effect of decreasing pay for airline pilots, especially at the small regional carriers that are the feeders for the major airlines. (Note that at the major airlines, pilots were able to maintain and even increase their pay and benefits by joining pilot labor unions.) Now the industry is short on pilots (because of mandatory retirements and also because airlines cut their pilot rosters too much in the pandemic), which is increasing salaries across the board.
Contrast that to teachers, in which schools are evidently going short-staffed instead of raising teacher pay.
Maybe more teachers need to unionize like the airline pilots did. Of course, there is a strong anti-union sentiment in this country, especially for public-sector employees.
Re: Supply and demand—except education is funded by the government, and is a long-term investment in its citizens, and is (usually) facing no real competition, so it’s pretty far from direct supply and demand, except in the sense that different districts in an area are competing against one another for teachers.
We could, as a society, decide that K–12 teaching should be an upper-middle class profession, but we haven’t.
Those numbers are interesting, but lack any context. I’m not sure how to compare “44% of public schools posted teaching vacancies” to other industries. It actually seems pretty low - I would expect most employers to have a vacancy each year. If you don’t, you are probably paying too much.
Of course Compensation is the #1 reason educators plan to quit - I’m sure it’s the #1 reason given for quitting in every industry.
I talk to lots of teachers, and compensation generally isn’t actually the reason they quit (or are thinking about quitting) - it’s all of the other crap that comes with teaching these days. Insane mandates from administration, insane parents that expect you to do everything while they do nothing, insane policies regarding students with special needs or behavior issues, growing class sizes with an ever-increasing list of required mandatory testing, etc…
But then again I live in a district with pretty good compensation for educators. I’m sure it varies greatly.
