Teachers around here top out at about $90k. Way too much IMHO.
She has a master’s and does not have to take classes to maintain her certification, aside from when the district implements a new system like when they went to integrated mathematics, rather than dividing it by algebra, geometry, etc.
Possibly, possibly not. Depends on what the new labor agreement brings in. And who cares if she gets another raise. Making 60+ is very good for someone in their 50s and is not being underpaid.
Depends. I can’t remember if he is on schedule 24 or 25, but it’s one of those two. In 3 years he will be making either 43.6 or 44.9k and in 5 years he’ll be getting either 46.9 or 49.3
And both of them get a lot more vacation time than I likely ever will. Although, it’s not all bunched since they are on year-round multi-tracks.
They are both paid very well for what they do. If your district is not paying you well, you need to change districts because there are several that will pay quite well.
Indeed, from purely anecdotal experience, most teachers I have spoken with would gladly give up some salary for lower class sizes and less paperwork.
Teachers in my jurisdiction are currently agitating for a 30 per cent pay raise over 3 years. The government is offering 9 per cent over 2.5 years, in line with inflation and wages policy.
Without letting my personal opinions get in the way, surprisingly teachers are NOT garnering much public sympathy for their current campaign. The 12 weeks of vacation they receive every year has something to do with this, coupled with the fact that they are proceeding with industrial action (strikes), despite the fact that their case is currently being heard before an impartial arbitration board.
Oh, yeah, the vacation.
Let me tell you about my vacations the past three years.
The first year, right out of the credential program, I taught a month long session of summer school. I would have taught two, but my program let out after the first session started. I earned just over $1000 for my time, and had three weeks off (that I spent getting all the paperwork lined up for my first teaching jobs - fingerprints, forms, licences, blood tests, physical, etcetera).
My second year, I taught another session of summer school, because I needed the money to pay for the laptop computer so that I could sit down and write out the curriculum I use in teaching eighth grade Writing, English, and Art. I couldn’t use the school computer because it was locked up for the summer, and my district doesn’t check out laptops to teachers. Between summer school and curriculum writing, I had about two weeks off.
Last summer, I took two online courses, researched the textbook selection for my English and Writing classes, had my tonsils removed, and then took a four hour daily ceramics course at a community college so that if my school does ever get the ceramics lab put in, I can run it. The three weeks I had off between courses was used up by my recovery from the tonsillectomy.
Most teachers I know hold down a second job of one sort or another during the summer - teaching summer school, running a business, working in construction - to make ends meet, because their teaching paychecks don’t quite do it. Me, I do okay. But then again, I’m single, living in the middle of nowhere - which does have a low cost of living - and I don’t have any kids.
California used to have a teacher shortage of nearly 30,000 positions. Then, last year that shortage disappeared. Did they hire 30,000 teachers? No, the state budget evaporated, and they ended up laying off something like 3,000 teachers. That gap still exists, but we don’t talk about it anymore, because there isn’t a hope in hell of getting those positions funded. Instead we cram thirty second graders into one classroom and hope like hell the teacher can manage to teach them how to read and write.
I’m not saying that teachers deserve to have money showered on them (though, I for one, would not object), but the idea that teaching is a blow-off job because of summer break is laughable. During the school year, the teachers in my district show up at 7:30 a.m. and stay until 5:30 or later. All of us take on extra jobs we spend a hundred hours or more on during the school year, and believe me, it’s not for that $100 stipend added on to the June paycheck. During the summer break, we’re taking classes, working on school matters we don’t have the time for during the school year, and taking on jobs to better pay the bills. Honestly, I don’t know how some of my colleages with kids manage to pull it off.
Obviously, there needs to be a better balance. I still remember my high school biology teacher complaining about having to do with old textbooks so that money could be spent to purchase equipment for a football program the school was starting. (And the school was no way big enough for a football team.) All I said was that, in contrast to my former opinion, I think sports can and probably should be part of that. And academics have to come first. If there isn’t money for the essentials, there isn’t money for sports.
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[QUOTE}And as far as your point about “taking away sports would also mean taking away art and music and foreign language,” haven’t you heard about all the schools across the country who are cutting back on or completely eliminating music classes? **[/QUOTE]
I know there are districts cutting back on art and music and “extras”. The point I was trying to make, apparently not well enough, was that if the criterion is whether the student will use it as a career, then there a lot of things that fall into that category. Some things have value beyond their practicality.
And as for this:
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I couldn’t agree more. We’ve had a couple of kids from our local high school go to college to play ball in the last couple of years who will not likely get anything out of their classroom experience there. “Dumb as a rock” is probably being kind. Tech school or vocational training of some kind would have served them better, I think.
It seems that our schools here are unusual. I assume that some of that is the city influence, pulling salaries up, but the range here is $40K to $80K. My daughter’s volleyball coach/PE teacher makes about $58K, but her AP English teacher is somewhere around $79K. I think those are not underpaid, even for the amount of time and effort teachers put in. I also think that most teachers should be somewhere in that vicinity, or what’s comparable in their area. Obviously not the way things are.
That person would be me. And the point I was trying to make was that it isn’t necessarily true that public school education is under par just because teachers are underpaid. The only school I referred to was the one my daughters attended. Yes, there are differences between the two types of schools, but the assumption that parochial schools don’t take the problem kids is just wrong. I know that our small school accepted several students who were expelled or in danger of being so, from the surrounding public schools. The class limit for grades above kindergarten was 28. My younger daughter’s first grade was the largest in the school. (Her graduating class was one of the smallest, but that’s another story.) Obviously there are things that private schools are not required to deal with, but the simple fact of paying teachers more doesn’t mean they will be better teachers, overall. That was all I was trying to say. I think my older daughter’s eighth grade teacher did a heck of a job for the $19K he was paid. I’d guess he’s doing just as good a job for a good bit more money he’s making at a public school now.
Mean annual wages in the United States, 2001
Preschool Teachers, Except Special Education: $20,940
Kindergarten Teachers, Except Special Education: $41,100
Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education: $43,320
Middle School Teachers, Except Special and Vocational Education: $43,570
Vocational Education Teachers, Middle School: $43,340
Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Vocational Education: $45,370
Vocational Education Teachers, Secondary School: $45,050
Special Education Teachers, Preschool, Kindergarten, and Elementary School: $44,900
Special Education Teachers, Middle School: $43,040
Special Education Teachers, Secondary School: $45,670
All Occupations: $34,020
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
phouka: I raised the vacation thing, so I should respond. Two things, I guess:
(1) Teachers in my state make a decent living. They don’t work second jobs in the summer to make ends meet. They of course complete some training and curriculum development during vacation times, but we’re talking 12 weeks here–head and shoulders above what people in other professions could ever hope for.
(2) Anedotes don’t equal data. The figures Walloon kindly provides would seem to indicate that your case is the exception rather than the norm. If a substantial number of teachers are working in vacations just to make a living wage, well how does the “average” American worker survive when they earn roughly $10,000 less than teachers?
Incidentally, Walloon’s figures would also appear to defeat the premise of the OP. Unless we care to redefine “living wage” as “earning below $43,000”.
Anecdotes, even.
I’m very bitter about this because for the last…oh…5 years or so that I lived at home, I didn’t have a mother.
Why? Because her school “volunteered” her for multiple things like putting together the yearbook or supervising afterschool programs.
I know what both my mother and father make. If my dad wasn’t around, my mom would not have been able to raise my sister and I on her salary and would’ve had to take a second job.
She’s been teaching for 30 years and I think her salary’s only increased by about…10,000 or so.
Also, while my physics textbook in high school was falling apart and getting taped back together every week or so by yours truly (it was about 15 years old), and all my teachers were having to buy their own dry-erase markers and their own supplies, the school board spent several thousand on re-doing our football stadium.
Agreed, However, the Los Angeles Unified School District has an annual budget of almost 9 BILLION dollars. (that’s right…BILLION)
The money is there in LA. Sadly, it doesn’t make it’s way to the classroom very often. I fear that a lot of administrators, contractors and lawyers are getting rich while some kids go to school in war zones with no textbooks.
Well, duh.
Why spend money on teachers when we can spend it on legislation?
After all, we’ve proven we can legislate quality into existence. Hell, “No Child Left Behind” practically makes it illegal to be stupid…
I think this deserves to be in Great Debates.
Indianapolis starts at roughly twice that amount and the cost of living is probably lower here than in much of Texas.
Mind you, that start is for the public schools. Private schools generally pay less.
Okay, so how many teachers are there in the LAUSD and what’s the mean wage? A rather easy shorthand way of looking at this would be to determine what percentage of education spending is spent on teacher wages and benefits.
I wish they could pay teachers more but A) some jurisdictions seem to have a problem and some don’t, and B) money doesn’t grow on trees. In this jurisdiction we have 120,000 elementary and high school teachers. A $5000 raise for each teacher would be six hundred million dollars. Frankly, Ontario doesn’t have six hundred million dollars extra to spend, so massive teacher raises just ain’t gonna happen. Now, that’s not to say Ontario is a typical case; teachers are paid pretty well here and the province is bleeding money, so there’s less of a problem and no easy solution if there was a problem. If they pay teachers in Texas $20,000 a year, well, there’s a problem. That might not necessarily be true in your state. But what are the numbers in California/LA?
I mean, I think in an ideal world teachers would all get a million bucks a year. Of course, I also think in an ideal world everyone would get a million dollars a year. But teaching salaries are generally pretty consistent from place to place in the USA and Canada, with regional variances; the roughly $40-$45K average that was cited is exactly what I expected. Like it or not, that is probably a reasonably accurate market price for a teacher. If you want to jack it up to $55K, you’ll have to tell me what objective evidence exists that it needs to be that high and where all that money is going to come from.
I fully and totally agree that crap like “No Child Left Behind” is, well, crap. I’m a quality auditor by trade and the first thing you look at when some organization makes a bold statement like that is to ask what resources they’ve devoted to accomplishing it. Platitudes don’t teach kids. On the other hand, neither do $20 bills. The statement that “we need to spend more money on education” is probably true but it’s not a solution; first you need to determine what exactly you want to accomplish, and then you determine what resources you need to buy to accomplish it, and THEN you can start budgeting.
I have enormous respect for teachers because my mother is one, and because I had a lot of great teachers, but I’m also objective enough to know about human nature with respect to the greenness of the grass and what side of the fence it’s on. Teaching is not a particularly bad job, on average, by any objective measurement. Walloon has cited wage figures that certainly do not suggest the average teacher lives in the poorhouse, most teachers have decent benefits, job security is generally better than most jobs, and the hours are normal and vacation fantastic. Complaining about working from 7:30 to 5:30 is absurd; I work more than that, get 3 weeks off a year, have to travel on business and I don’t think my job is particularly unusual or overly challenging. And my salary is about average for a teacher. Frankly, I can get by on my salary. If I could figure out a way to get a teaching certificate part time I’d probably become one. (Regrettably, no such program exists around here.) Teachers are not rolling in money, but what some - not all - teachers do not seem to understand is that We all face the same problems, folks!
Already in this thread I see that people are really talking about TWO different problems - teacher salaries, and classroom resources. Do we need to spend more money on one or the other or both? If so, how much? And not just ideals; what objective and verifiable evidence is there to support taking money away from other programs to put into your educational suggestions? Not every platitude about education turns out to be true; they said computers would be a Godsend in the classroom and that turned out to be crap (Cliff Stoll was right, by God) and now I’m seeing studies that suggest that the smaller-classroom mantra might not actually have anything to it until you get down to like 14 kids. It may be true that raising the teacher’s salary by X percent will improve educational results by Y, but it might NOT be true. Or marginal return Y might not be enough to justify salary hike X when you find the same money dedicated to special ed or books or something would have done more. Let’s see the hard evidence.
I don’t give two hoots how teachers’ salaries to compare to “All Occupations.” That’s not meaningful. I’d like to see how they compare to “All Professions” or other occupations that require specific four-year specialized degree and some sort of professional certification. That would be truly comparative data.
I don’t think the issue is whether or not teachers can “get by” better than the average wage earner. The issue is the value of their work to society and the importance of the task to which we entrust them.
Am I the only one who see the irony in the fact that of the 3 R’s, only one of them is spelled correctly?
Sorry Wheel, gotta disagree. To reinforce Walloon’s figures - snips from this thread, What’s wrong with public education, how do we fix it, and how do we pay for it? from GD 6/2002.
Not really. In a capitalist society, the market sets salaries. If there is a significant dearth of qualified teachers, then the pay is probably too low. If there are significantly more qualified applicants than job opennings, then the pay is probably too high.
There isn’t a completely free market in the educational world, but it’s pretty damn close. States (and counties within states) compete with each other, and private schools compete with public schools for teachers. Add to that the fact that teachers have a very strong union to support them, and I don’t see any evidence that anything is keeping teacher pay artificially low.
There is no such thing as what a profession “should” be paid. Only what the market determines it actually is paid.
Does anybody in the knee-jerk “adjust the wages” faction have the faintest idea how difficult it is to get a job that will pay $30,000 in one summer, reliably, summer after summer?
The why don’t you dig up the data? With all due respect, if you posit that teachers are paid less than other comparable professionals, it is you who need to back that up with solid data, not anecdotal information.
But even if you can prove that they are paid less, all it really proves is that we, as a society, value teachers’ work less than we value the others’. We may say we value their work more, but it’s actions that determine what your actual beliefs are, not words.