In my neck-o-the-woods, teachers by contract work 185 days a year.
Divide their salary by 185 and you’ll see how much they make per day.
We need more male teachers....
Well over a hundred thousand in my mis size city......Half a year for mumbo jumbo college courses...
Average teacher salaries in this rural area are about 60-80 K a year, plus 28 K in medical, and 5-10K in pension. Over 100K for the “poor” teachers.
Destroy the teachers’ unions and you restore the Republic.
Teachers, unlike other professionals, are government emplpyees. Government employees should NEVER be allowed to unionize. They serve at the pleasure of the taxpayers.
A good friend of mine is a retired high school principal. As he puts it, there are three main reasons people want to become teachers: June, July, and August.
Many of them also work summers, so their pay is at least $6,000 on top of their teacher salary.
Schools exist for the students.
Are the students first, or are the teachers first?
Most people understand the concept of paying more for a premium product.
Are the schools producing a premium product?
While I can’t dispute what some teachers make in some parts of the country (I’ve heard numbers in the $35K range in Texas for example), I can say that from personal experience, the teachers I know, most with Bachelor’s Degrees, a few with Master’s Degrees, are in the $76,000 to $115,000 per year, with incredible benefits packages (like working about half the year). I won’t argue for or against whether there should be pay increases, but I would definitely say what we’re being told doesn’t purport with reality.
Again . . .
Another article about teachers’ pay that left out the most important part: RESULTS.
Before the covid hoax, less than 40% of American students were proficient in English and less than 35% were proficient in mathematics. They have since changed the metrics and the way proficiency is reported to make it impossible to gauge what is going on. They have hidden the huge drops in doublespeak and to free up the little time they did teach for more indoctrination.
If you paid an airline to go from New York City to Los Angeles and they dropped you off in Cincinnati would you accept that? Taxpayers pay these teachers outrageous sums even though they are not doing the job they are paid being paid to do. Where are the Congressional investigations? If your FedEx or UPS driver started out every morning to deliver 100 packages and only 35 were delivered would they be fired? Time to either terminate every teacher not providing the results we pay for or cut their pay and benefits by 65%.
Perhaps most college students should be offered and take teacher certification qualifying courses. Such a practice would ensure most college graduates could make as much as a teacher and that teachers would not make much more than other college graduates.
“A normal school or normal college is an institution created to train teachers by educating them in the norms of pedagogy and curriculum. In the 19th century in the United States, instruction in normal schools was at the high school level, turning out primary school teachers. Many such schools are now called teacher training colleges or teachers’ colleges, but in Mexico, continue to be called normal schools, with student-teachers being known as normalistas.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_school
“In 1685, St. Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, established the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, founded what is generally considered the first normal school, the École Normale, in Reims, Champagne, France. The term “normal” in this context refers to the goal of these institutions to instill and reinforce particular norms within students. “Norms” included historical behavioral norms of the time, as well as norms that reinforced targeted societal values, ideologies and dominant narratives in the form of curriculum.”
Read later.
The unions have rigged the rules. For example, there are tens of thousands of retirees/professionals who clearly have the academic background to teach virtually any subject in any grade. A college degree should allow anyone to apply to teach most subjects in elementary thru high school. A high school degree should qualify a person to teach K-3rd grade. There are blue collar workers who could teach Vo-Tech classes. Instead, the “teachers” are all “education majors,” which are the easiest degrees to obtain in college. Without this major, it is virtually impossible to become a teacher in most states. Open up teacher positions to the general public and the salaries/benefits would drop, while the qualitiy of the teaching would increase.
Some years ago, an Oregon school district offered to raise the entry salary for teachers. That was rejected by the union.
Not quite accurate.
My wife got into teaching for a brief period thinking it would be great pay-per-hour-worked.
She taught health sciences classes (electives intended to expose students to the medical field).
She found the opposite to be the case.
During her multi-year probationary period, she had at least one required meeting per week with her faculty mentor for which 30 minutes were unpaid due to being outside contract hours.
She also had at least one meeting per month with other "beginning" teachers 30 minutes of which were outside contract hours and unpaid.
There were the required weekly office hours amounting to 30 minutes unpaid per week.
Then there were the required weekly department meetings which added on another unpaid 30 minutes per week.
Then there was the required monthly faculty meeting costing her 30 minutes unpaid monthly.
Then there was a monthly countywide meeting which took at least two hours per month since the meetings were outside contract hours and she had to drive to a different school for the meetings (before the China virus).
She had a daily planning period but that would often be taken covering a class for which a substitute was unavailable.Such coverage was uncompensated.
She also had to perform unpaid student supervision. This could be before school, during lunch, after school, etc.
Once per semester she had to show up for several unpaid hours of "Meet the teacher" night.
Several times per semester she might be required to perform multiple hours of unpaid assistance for a variety of testing such as SAT, ACT, pre-SAT, pre-ACT, and others.
She had to be present and perform specific unpaid duties during the annual graduation ceremony. This was four unpaid hours per year.
She had to attend recruiting sessions at feeder middle schools once per year requiring at least 6 unpaid hours per year.
She was expected to be involved with the Health Sciences student organization including plan and accompany students on over-night field trips for which she only received mileage, meal and lodging compensation. This was at minimum 24 hours unpaid time per semester.
During the summer she had to attend training courses in a city 2 hours away. Depending on scheduling, this could burn an entire week for which her only compensation was course reimbursement, meals, lodging and mileage.
Now we get to time she actually spent preparing lessons for multiple different classes, grading assignments and communicating with parents. This was over-the-top. All her waking hours at home. The children and I had to take on her normal household functions during this time.
All of this and she had the ever present chance of an administrator randomly walking into her class to "evaluate" her performance. In the beginning it was about 5-6 random evaluations per year but finally became 3. After each random evaluation she had to sit with the administrator for at least 30 minutes unpaid and be told what she was doing wrong, no if's, and's or buts allowed by her.
She stayed at it 5 years while our two oldest passed through high school. Finally, she threw the towel in and went back to being a nurse.
She developed an intense hatred of voter initiatives to increase teacher pay since the system was so bloated with administrators, counselors, librarians, support staff, and many others who had not taught a class in decades yet whose pay was indexed to teacher pay.
No one on this thread should bash teachers and their pay without spending a full year in a classroom of 25 elementary students, each having their own special needs. You have to be able to teach, in a group, the low achievers and the high achievers. Simultaneously.
Practically every teacher I know does not spend time working only during classroom hours. When they go home, they are correcting papers in the evening. And they have to be able to handle every behavioral problem they come across. Oh! And they get to deal with approximately 50 parents, many of whom think they would do better teaching the class than the teacher. And they can never be pleased.
All of that time off teachers get? They really need that time to recharge physically, mentally, and emotionally. Because they have to be at 100% during classroom time. They can’t walk outside to take a five minute break. They can’t choose went to go to the bathroom.
Unquestionably, teachers tend to vote for Democrats. And in many schools, the students are not getting or taking advantage of their education possibilities. But to bash teachers based on a superficial assessment and without personal experience is ignorant and meaningless.
Almost every job contributes but not every job pays the same. Just the way things are. Just the way they have always been.
In Oklahoma, if you want to pay teachers more eliminate the many very small independent screwl districts each with its own full administration from superintendent on down. Consolidate them, eliminate the expense of the individual administrations.
Teaching children isn’t rocket science and the only changes that cause problems are imposed by the gooberment people who need something to do to prove their relevance or are busy bodies controlling other’s lives.
There is not one thing in basic education that has really needed to change in at least the last 70 years I have lived. New developments in technology maybe, new historical events but basic skills of reading, writing and math remain virtually unchanged.
There have been more problems created than solved by teacher’s unions and particularly education “professionals”.
Those arguments exist ONLY because government schools are run by the government. You want to see what teachers REALLY should be paid? Privatize education. Entirely. Get government out of the business. Entirely.
The free market will show what education should look like, what it should cost, and what teachers should be paid.
My girls were Home Schooled K thru 12.
They are both very productive.....Both in their 30's now.