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Here in Chicago, teachers are paid well. Teachers typically start around $40K and some districts (New Trier and Stevenson) pay up to $50K to start. After 30 years, there are teachers making over $100K, especially in the city of Chicago.
Teachers have a pension while many private employers do not. I think teachers are an honorable profession but saying they are underpaid is like saying firemen, police officers, nurses are underpaid. It is the popular thing to say as the work they do cannot truly be quantified with a paycheck.
What is ridiculous about the teaching profession is there is no real accountability once a teacher makes tenure. Teachers are required to get masters degrees but most do it thru night school at local community colleges, what a joke.
Whether a teacher went to Brown or some local city college, they still get paid the same, regardless of talent. This is simply not fair for the best and brightest teachers and encourages them to go into other fields. Also, this dumbs down the teacher pool. I had some smart teachers growing up, but honestly I was smarter than most of my teachers by high school. In many of the schools, especially the lower performing ones, teachers are just glorified babysitters.
And this is coming from a person whose mother, grandmother, and great-grandmothers were all teachers.
I don't buy the argument that teachers are underpaid. If a teacher who makes $32K per year makes $21/hr, this means that a tenured teacher making $128K per year (we have some of those in Chicago) is making $84k/hr. That is around what I make, and I am a corporate banker with far more qualifications that some teacher. To become a teacher all I would have to do is sit for the test and get board certified. I have often thought about actually going back and teaching social studies and coaching cross-country, but feel my abilities are better used in the corporate world.
I always thought school teachers and police officers should make millions a year, and movie stars and athletes should make $100K a year, tops.
Shows how screwed up our society is. We can live very nicely without professional sports and movies, but school teachers are very necessary to the future of the world.
If you quadruple teachers pay, you would have people standing in line, and you could root out the poor ones, and no more ten year. Allow the cream to rise to the top.
No, I don't ever expect to see it happen, but it's nice to dream.
PS, I'm not a teacher, and I love pro sports, I just believe in what's fair and right......
The cream of the crop does not in general tend to go into teaching. There are much more lucrative careers for high performers to go into. Still, there are some high performers who love educating the youth of America. God bless you for taking on such a noble profession and working hard to teach our youth.
Screw the many of the rest, particularly the tenured worksheet teachers we have all had.
I appreciate the hard work SOME of the teachers do, but for those that work off of the same worksheets and coursework they have done every year for the past 20 years, you about as worthless as many who work at the DMV.
Wow, my husband is a teacher and he has often commented how disdainful people are towards his occupation. I've told him that he is wrong, but know I see that he is correct. How sad.
People don't complain about people working in fast food not making enough money because it is unskilled labor that anyone walking off the street can do. (I worked my way through college - so I know that this is a fact.) Most teachers today have to have advanced degrees and you would be hard pressed to find someone who could walk of the street and do the job. My husband spent a good deal of our weekend looking up primary materials regarding local Native American tribes for a lessons in his classroom. If you know the difference between primary and secondary sources, thank a teacher. Every six weeks the theme that he has to teach to changes. There are no repeated lesson plans - he has to create new lessons for each day.
I think it is completely unbalanced that I know admin assists on Wall Street who make 20k a year more than my husband makes teaching in the Bronx.
There have been comments about tenure... I think people need to understand that just because you have tenure does not mean you are golden and can do whatever you wish... it just means that once you are tenured you need a hearing to get fired... if you are not tenured you can get the boot without a real reason... that is the difference... and I have seen several tenured teachers fired... so, it is a misunderstood concept..
I think it is completely unbalanced that I know admin assists on Wall Street who make 20k a year more than my husband makes teaching in the Bronx.
Would your husband be willing to stop teaching in order to be an admin assistant on Wall Street? Probably not, because if he is like most good teachers he loves what he does and is willing to make sacrifices to do it.
Right now, the market for teachers supports the pay scale that teachers are making. The market for admin assistants supports their pay scale - the firms on Wall Street won't attract any qualified candidates if they paid $20K less a year. Most admin assistants don't love what they do, but they do it because the compensation is enough to make it worth their time emotionally.
School districts that don't pay enough don't attract teachers. I remember the bonuses that some districts in California were offering a few years back because they weren't attracting teachers.
Would your husband be willing to stop teaching in order to be an admin assistant on Wall Street? Probably not, because if he is like most good teachers he loves what he does and is willing to make sacrifices to do it.
Right now, the market for teachers supports the pay scale that teachers are making. The market for admin assistants supports their pay scale - the firms on Wall Street won't attract any qualified candidates if they paid $20K less a year. Most admin assistants don't love what they do, but they do it because the compensation is enough to make it worth their time emotionally.
School districts that don't pay enough don't attract teachers. I remember the bonuses that some districts in California were offering a few years back because they weren't attracting teachers.
Yes, my husband would teach for free and put all of our money into the classroom, but there aren't many people out there like him. I think we would want to pay more in order to attract the best and brightest instead of relying on martyrs like him?
The bottom line is that before the Women's Movement, smart women who wanted to work could become teachers or nurses. That was it. Those women are now retiring and few are lining up to replace them. Why should we? To be blamed for all of the problems in our schools? No thank you.
NYC has to fill it's classrooms with Teaching Fellows who take the cheap MA and then bolt. Most new teachers don't last five years. For many, it's just something to do until you figure out what you really want to do with your life or while you work on your novel.
We're seeing a lot of people go into nursing because they see how much money you can make with a two year degree. A nurse with a couple of years on the job in Seattle could easily make $60K a year plus shift differential of up to $4200 a year. With ten years they are making closer to $75K plus benefits. Unfortunately, they don't have a passion for helping people - they just see the money. We wind up with a bunch of nurses who are dissatisfied with their jobs and who don't have the temperament to help those who a sick and injured, which is one of the problems we have with health care today. About 1/4 of our nursing staff are temporary workers because they make more money as traveler RNs than as staff RNs.
I wonder if we'd see the same thing if teachers got paid a lot more with the same 39 week schedule. There would be a lot more applicants for the jobs, but would they be good teachers? Would they have the same passion for teaching and for education as those who currently work in the profession have? There might be more people who would otherwise work as engineers or physicists or managers in front of the classroom, but are those really the people that we want teaching our kids?
How do we balance the need for more qualified teachers with the risk of attracting people who want the 39 week schedule and good pay but don't have the passion for education?
Teachers are required to get masters degrees but most do it thru night school at local community colleges, what a joke.
Can you find me a local community college that confers MASTERS degrees? Most community colleges confers Associates degrees. A handful confer Bachelors degrees. I have never heard of a community college that offered Masters degrees.
I got my Masters degree at night (from a regular university). I worked all day, did schoolwork/attended classes at night. It's not that easy.
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Chicago and its suburbs teacher pay
