Posted on 02/02/2007 5:20:28 AM PST by Zakeet
Who, on average, is better paid--public school teachers or architects? How about teachers or economists? You might be surprised to learn that public school teachers are better paid than these and many other professionals. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school teachers earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, 36% more than the hourly wage of the average white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty or technical worker.
In the popular imagination, however, public school teachers are underpaid. "Salaries are too low. We all know that," noted First Lady Laura Bush, expressing the consensus view. "We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more." Indeed, our efforts to hire more teachers and raise their salaries account for the bulk of public school spending increases over the last four decades. During that time per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled; overall we now annually spend more than $500 billion on public education.
The perception that we underpay teachers is likely to play a significant role in the debate to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. The new Democratic majority intends to push for greater education funding, much of which would likely to go toward increasing teacher compensation. It would be beneficial if the debate focused on the actual salaries teachers are already paid.
It would also be beneficial if the debate touched on the correlation between teacher pay and actual results. To wit, higher teacher pay seems to have no effect on raising student achievement. Metropolitan areas with higher teacher pay do not graduate a higher percentage of their students than areas with lower teacher pay.
In fact, the urban areas with the highest teacher pay are famous for their abysmal outcomes.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Become a Pharmacist the average pay in NO for a staff pharmacist is 95K a year. No students and you have an assistant to help count the pills and make labels.
Also don't most nurses and doctors have HORRIBLE hours and even totally unpredictable hours? (My uncle is a doctor - and especially as a child, when he worked at a hospital, he would be called out at various times - they were the only people with beepers in the '70s - and had to work all kinds of weird shifts varying pretty much continuously.)
There are obviously people with strong opinions on both sides. Some say teachers are paid too much; some say teachers are paid too little. How do we square this circle and find the real answer? Easy! Let the market in, break the union, and introduce vouchers. Then teachers will be paid exactly what they are worth. No more; no less. No more arguments.
There is a little something called course of study and requirements. Most of the people I knew years ago became teachers by default. With a lot of them having a major in partying. In short all those survey course are really hard. Please note I never said all. :)
"You people all need a wake up call. These are college educated individuals."
So what?!? I have a friend with a masters in psychology. He's lucky if he can get a job making 25K working full-time, year round. A degree entitles one to nothing but your whole post seems to be about some entitlement you feel is deserved because of some degree your wife has. This, "Oh poor me, I work 2/3 as much as everybody else and get paid the same. Boo-Hoo". Pardon me if I hang on to my hankerchief.
Welcome to everybody else's world, pal. I've been working ias an IT professional for 10 years and I don't make $34 an hour. I have to fly all over the country and be away from my family for weeks sometimes. I commute 50 miles to work and have 40K miles a my 1-year old car. I leave at 6:30 and get home 13 hours later. I'm not sure what my house looks like in the daylight.
So spare me, OK.
In many states, school teachers can get unemployement for the time they do get off in the summer time, so lets not forget that asoect of teachers' perks...I know it was so in NYS in many disctricts!
Unlike a computer network all problems are not the same in education. You don't start out with a faulty switch and change it out. There are no magic programs. Sometime the circuits are bad and nothing can be done. A kid just can't be replaced. It's not 1's and 0's each one is an individual and often has problems at home that the teacher can't control. These are children not buggy whips or parts made on a CNC lathe. To compare a child with a product shows a vast ignorance of teaching and of human development.
My husband is a teacher. I know. What is a summer vacation?
If you compare salaries most pro-football player make more in one game than Pediatricians make in a year.
Bears repeating.
Including the ironic fact that these teachers think "hourly pay" comparisons is somehow, "wrong", and should only use "annuals".
It is the most scientific way to do it.
BTW, my mother was a great teacher. And she would agree most of this is hogwash.
Unfortunately, there a very dark downside to large teaching salaries. First of all, how can you put a dollar amount on what is enough when it comes to our children? You can't, so you have to go with what taxpayers can bear. But the downside is that bad teachers--and there are enough of them--who absolutely hate teaching will not leave because they cannot get a job that pays anywhere near the salary they are getting. These are people you don't want near your children. Before there was such a disparity of salaries between teachers and other jobs for people with four-year college degrees, bad teachers just left teaching.
SO CHANGE JOBS.
I agree that these people are college educated individuals; however, I don't think that there are many people that would be "appalled" with $34 an hour.
In a "typical" job, $34/hour amounts to around $70,000 a year. That's a dang good salary, especially for just a four year degree. The point of this article is that there are architects and economists and other "professionals" that DON'T make $34 an hour.
I agree with the rest of your post, though. Vouchers=good. Get the NEA out.
What color is the sky in your world?
Many teachers in technical fields earn MUCH more during summer breaks. But you’re right that the majority of teachers with soft degrees are not qualified to earn their salaries in the private sector.
All those job complaints you listed exist in blue and white collar private industry to varying degrees– poor benefits, need to keep up with technology on your own time, no break time at work, after hour expectations, etc.. Sometimes they’re better, sometimes worse, but nowhere outside of teaching is a salary spread out over 2-3 contiguous months where the worker is not working. There’s no way around that. If Teacher’s salaries are calculated hourly and compared to other professions, they need to be adjusted to account for summer breaks.
If teachers are so well paid for easy work, how come the education majors are supposedly the dumbest, not the smartest college students? Why would anyone with a 120+ IQ choose to become an engineer, attorney, or doctor, if teachers are the best paid professionals around?
Your worst case would correlate with the worst teachers imaginable. They exist, but I've met only a handful that work those hours. My hours were 6:30 to 4:30 - 5:00 depending on which after-school activities I was obligated to supervise, plus commute, plus assorted evening hours, plus a significant portion of every weekend. And after a while, the internal time-value-of-money gauge kicked in (also known as common sense) and I took my math & science skills elsewhere. Now I work regular, predictable hours with good benefits - including flex hours and vacation time I can actually use - less stress and more sleep, more time with loved ones and friends. I also make three times as much as I did teaching. Simple cost-benefit analysis.
The public school model is a lost cause and I won't defend it. I won't defend the intellectual lightweights that gravitate toward that field. But it is disingenuous in the extreme to suggest that the majority of teachers work a shorter day or week than the rest of the workforce. I encourage anyone who doubts this to take a stint as a long-term substitute teacher and see for yourself.
Most public school teachers are required to obtain a master's degree- so that is six years of education. Are you really suggesting that starting teachers make $34/hour?
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