That depends heavily on the location (i.e. school district). Last time I looked at the school district budgets, school teachers where I live make, on average over $100k/yr plus health insurance and a sweet pension plan. The next town over, I think they make half that.
I live in a state where they pay is pretty decent starting around $50k a year (they should be making more, but still not a bad start). Also the state pays for pretty much all of your Masters degree. Their health insurance is top notch and their pension is solid. Lots of states really don’t care for public education.
Tenured positions, strong unions, pensions, benefits the average blue collared worker can dream of, and no accountability or pressures to ensure students make their marks. I can support raises once merit pay is instituted and they start doing something about the bad teachers, of which young me would say is the majority.
Tenured? We are talking kindergarten here. Also, are you seriously comparing an advanced-degree career to blue-collar workers?
How is it you'd institute a merit system? By the volume-of-students-per-hour, or what, exactly? The least complaining parents? Test scores that depend on parental involvement to be any good? How are disinterested or absentee parents or those parents who have it in for teachers accounted for in such a system?
The teachers union where I am is strong, but it doesn't preclude the administration from playing tricks similar to the exactly 39-hour "part time" employee. Specifically, the teachers get "fired" on the last day of the school year, and turn hired back in the fall, in some sort of adminstration-union rule avoiding shell game.
It's a wonder anyone wants to do the job at all, knowing all this in advance. I almost became a teacher once. Figured all the abuse would be a degrading waste of my efforts.
Yea - but maybe for such an important role for society we can actually put up the cash to make it a worthwhile career choice. I've heard the "we don't want teachers who are only in it for the cash" line enough that I want to puke. If you paid enough to attract the leeches legitimate teachers would get them sacked right quick.
Cool. But people need to eat and our society (at least in the US) is completely run via cash - you can appeal to higher ideals all you want, but if you're starving out teachers you're going to lose a lot of the good ones that can go into other fields of education and communication.
I think a lot of teachers do value the experience of teaching enough that they'll stick with it through thick and thin - but a lot of folks never even consider teaching due to just how poor the wages are.
It's not just about money. Ultimately, it's about respect. Considering the clearing price in a free market is good and all, but you have to consider there's a buyer representing real people, who determines the working condition of this group. And also a seller whose life will be made easier and more dignified if they're properly paid, which will in turn attract better and less desperate teachers.
When I say paid, I obviously also mean in intangible ways, such as having enough time to go to the toilet between classes. Or being insulated from being yelled at by parents and meekly saying sorry for telling off their particularly concentration-destroying kid.
If they were entirely not motivated by money, we could just have them do it for free. I think clearly teachers expect at least a little money, and perhaps many potential teachers would expect even more.
I think if we removed the need to earn money to get a decent living, we would have a lot of people teaching for free.
Most people are not motivated by money, they reluctantly accept that they need to earn a living, but it is not a big driver per se in most people I know.
In a lot of cases, they don't want to do the job. There are teacher shortages in a lot of the United States, especially in states that are infamous for mistreating teachers, like Texas.
That really surprised me when I moved up here - suddenly I lost a whole class of jokes about how underpaid teacher are. It shows too, you can look at things like IP creation (comedians, musicians, writers, performers) and even vaccination rates to see the benefits investing in education can get you.
Sorry to shit on your sacred cow, but you mean overpaid. For babysitting.
The education children get in public schools is abysmal.
Good teachers that actually educate are exceedingly rare.
The education requirements for teachers is a sick joke. If you get a master's degree in underwater basket weaving, have a tolerance for noise, you join a teacher's union, work 9 months out of the year, get weeks of holidays, get virtue by association, a retirement, and are basically employed for life. Unfireable.
The reason teachers aren't paid more is because what they do isn't worth paying them more.
Some of the smarter ones move to private schools, but more of the good ones burn out and either leave, or stop giving a shit. Formalized regurgitation and pavlovian schedule training prepares kids for 9 to 5 bullshit. Barely. The rest is hit and miss on a garbled curriculum of mostly irrelevant filler and fluff.
You can't continue inflicting the bullshit teachers on the good ones, or on the kids. Unions have to end for certain classes of employment, but especially teaching. A vast majority of teachers need to be canned and kicked to the curb.
Kids deserve better, and that starts with honestly addressing the problem in the classroom.
There's a market that works on software engineers. Ability, work ethic, and quality of output plays a significant part in who gets hired and fired. There are no mechanisms by which bad teachers are removed, as long as they check the boxes for attendance, not being visibly intoxicated, etc. The profession is riddled with incompetents and bad actors.
Actual good teachers are rare.
Simply being able to fire the bad ones would improve things immeasurably, but for some reason people put all teachers on pedestals. It's grotesque. Give PTAs hire/ fire powers or better yet, give the public a vote, weighted by testing scores or some performance metrics. Union ride or die is a garbage way to do things.
Treating teachers like a special caste of unimpeachable holy people is nonsense.
> Give PTAs hire/ fire powers or better yet, give the public a vote,
They are already good at driving good teachers out of the profession without a formal direct personnel role, giving them more power would make things worse.
Teachers can be fired for poor performance. It is just rare, because proving poor performance is dubious in education. Good teachers want bad teachers out. There just isn’t a motivating force for the supervisor to do it unless the teacher is truly a harm to the kids.
Everything going on in education over the past 20 years has been to add that overarching, cross school performance metric to measure teachers against each other. The problem is:
1. How do you measure performance? Tests. What will any educator or student tell you? Ends up test performance doesn’t really correlate much to the quality of the teacher. What it does correlate well to is income of the student’s parents. You teach in a school that serves low-income families? You’re fired. Also tests don’t factor that some students are special needs. You have a lot of special needs students in your class one year? Sorry. You’re fired.
2. No one could seem to find the money to incentivize good performance of teachers. Just fire poor performers based on dubious criteria. Not exactly motivating.
3. Outside of test scores, which are a bad representation of teacher quality and easily manipulated, there isn’t a driving force to fire teachers.
Your comments may be true some places but are broadly generalized. The states I’ve lived in have had great public school systems. They pay their teachers well and have great pensions and benefits. Where I grew up the administration did a terrible job managing funds but our teachers were great and eventually the state stepped in and got things running better. Problem is there are just some places that don’t give a shit about public education and places that have a big push to privatize it, and that sure as shit doesn’t always mean better. Just means our tax dollars are going to some company instead of straight to schools.
