I'm sorry, but my mom made $125,000 pre tax as a teacher every year in NY and retired with a very similar pension payable to her and her husband until death.
I am their son. I am college educated, I make $50,000 per year on average and I've been laid off 3 times over my 6 years of post college employment. I have never been offered a 401k, which is a particularly ineffective retirement tool anyway.
How are teachers underfunded again? Maybe in certain underfunded neighborhoods, but not all. And their employment is pretty secure.
I don't have a problem with the salary. What I have a problem with:
1. Pension spiking. Happens for teachers, though not as much as other public employees.
2. The pension should be funded from investments, not some optimistic guess as to the return on those investments.
3. It should be easier to fire a bad teacher. I realize this is hard, but we've all heard the stories. In my excellent school district, you apparently have to be caught sexting teenagers to get fired, even though a lot of people had reported the offensive behavior, many times over many years. While most of my son's teachers are excellent, a few of them shouldn't be anywhere near students of any sort.
This is a problem with most public employees though. It's not necessarily unique to teachers. Try to fire a bad cop for instance. Just won't happen. Or a bad database analyst at your State's Department of Administration or whatever. You just can't do it.
The salary is excellent and well above US GDP per capita. The benefits, of course, are even better.
But the pensions are driving housing prices and property taxes through the roof around here. I luckily found 2 other roommates to live with me in a 1br apartment far outside the city, and we're all paying $650 each. Property tax accounts for 33% of our rent contribution.
> The salary is excellent and well above US GDP per capita.
GDP per capita is a stupid measuring stick for salary (except that an annual one below it is bad), since you are averaging eco onic activity across everyone, including those not working and outside the labor force (children, prisoners etc.)
> But the pensions are driving housing prices and property taxes through the roof around here.
I'd like to see your argument for how pensions are driving those two things (especially given that California has limits on the latter.)
While a number of retirees move to Florida permanently, a number of New York pension recipients remain on Long Island because their house is paid off and their pension is tax exempt from everything but Federal tax. So 80k in pension payments is equivalent to 120k in salary roughly (which is taxed heavily in payroll and state taxes).
So, they stay in NY for the good doctors and paid-off house and soldier through the cold weather. All of this wouldnt be a big deal if NIMBYism wasn't a thing, but it is.
Population on Long Island continues to explode as people commute by train to NYC to avoid exploding rents there. Building a house or remodeling a house on Long Island is extremely, mind-blowingly expensive and regulated due to the local town governments in Huntington, Oyster Bay, Manhasset, Babylon, Brookhaven, etc. I have tried really hard to get any town to permit me to build a 100k house on a 40k lot of land- nope, sorry, we only allow massive houses built out of expensive materials here because we want you to pay as much property tax as possible.
"...my mom made $125,000 pre tax as a teacher every year in NY..."
Holy MOLY that's a lot of money!
Out here in "Flyover Country", (Wisconsin), most teachers wouldn't even make half that much. And I'm assuming by the way you described her salary, that none of that included any of the benefits! That's an incredible amount of money for a teacher. I would think a lot of teachers would like that salary.
I'm pretty sure you can safely assume that your mother is nowhere even CLOSE to being the norm for teachers across the nation. There are many, many teachers out there who are very much underfunded.
Sounds like you should be contacting "anoncoward111" to find out where his mother taught school at in NY. That district probably has at least one new opening since she has apparently retired.
Haha, her position was filled by the principal's niece. Nepotism is alive and well.
Any school district on Long Island NY will have minimum salaries of like 60-70k I think. 90% of property taxes here (~10k USD per house) go to the school district.
It unfortunately shouldn't be a surprise that someone in Wisconsin paying $600 in property tax per year also has a school district with teachers making 40k, which, once again, isn't even a bad salary for the profession and value delivered. Maybe I'm just jaded, but 13 years of schooling qualified me for barely gainful employment. I could have home-schooled myself for way cheaper and with the same outcome.
Most teachers in New York have a low base and a 30-step path, with 1.5-3% raises in each step. Most pay 2-5% of salary into the pension fund, which in New York is administered at the state level, so you don't have the gross mismanagement that you see in California. 125k implies she was a long tenured teacher who did significant afterschool work -- and the district paid about 20% of her compensation to the retirement fund.
I live in the #2 salary district in upstate NY. The 50th percentile salary is about 75k and the 95th percentile is 95k. Pensions are usually (final average salary over 3-5 years) * (years of service / 60), and are free of state tax. If you retire, you have different options, and full payments to both spouses reduce your benefit by 15-35% depending on age of your spouse.
My cousin is a high school teacher with 15 years of work. He makes ~$65k and gets a $5k stipend for coaching two sports. (ie. working 12 hours days September-March)
She did after-school work during her last 3 years to artificially raise her salary. Not only is the pension free of state tax, it is also free of payroll tax.
So, at 55 she retired with an after tax pension that was quite literally equal to her after tax salary. When you factor in commuting costs, she was paid to retire early.
The whole point here for me is the guaranteed nature of this employment. It's incredibly hard to be fired. If teaching children is such a valuable societal tool, we shouldn't be restricting the number of teachers to x and their salary to y.
We should encourage 1000x people to be teachers and pay them 0.03y
I am their son. I am college educated, I make $50,000 per year on average and I've been laid off 3 times over my 6 years of post college employment. I have never been offered a 401k, which is a particularly ineffective retirement tool anyway.
How are teachers underfunded again? Maybe in certain underfunded neighborhoods, but not all. And their employment is pretty secure.