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.
Is that a FULL 8 hour day like most people work? Or is it 8:30 to 3:30 with 4 breaks during the day?
While that is true, they really can't go out and get short-time jobs during Christmas or Easter breaks, much less over the summer.
I had a teacher friend who got so tired of competing with kids for summer jobs in construction (which was predominantly what was available) that he quit teaching and started his own construction business.
He was much happier as a result.
> Divide their salary by 185 and you’ll see how much they make per day. <
It’s a bit more complicated than that. I taught chemistry and physics. Most of my Saturdays were spent grading lab reports. And my work day didn’t end when the last bell rang. I’d stay after school checking collected homework and helping students who needed it.
English teachers had it worse. They had much more to grade. Grading a chemistry lab is rather straightforward. An English composition is much more labor intensive. And the coaches…they get paid extra for coaching. It works out to about $2 an hour (not kidding).
All teachers have one prep (preparation) period during the day. I spent mine setting up or breaking down labs. Others would be trying to call home regarding a problem student, etc. Some loafed, but not many.
Having said all that, are their teachers who skirt their responsibilities, and do essentially nothing? You betcha. About 15% of the teachers I taught with fit that description.
Oh, and one more thing. Do public schools need reform? Yes, desperately. But it’s not the unions (as corrupt as the are) who are standing in the way. It’s the arrogant and clueless central administrators. Those folks are insulated from reality in their offices. Yet they issue the most insane directives.
Yep, in NYS those salaries are $75k and up for 185 days. AND, great retirement benefits AND huge payouts at 55 to retire WITH subsidized health insurance..
185d days a year... and often that’s a 6 hour day...
Go further than that and divide it by the number of hours the teacher’s work per week. Then remember that teachers ( where I live get two teachers’s days off per month plus several half days for teacher prep and no longer have to work bus duty or recess duty.
Back in 1971, the NEA, meeting in Philadelphia, hired Saul Alinsky to do their union organizing for them. He changed the goal of the NEA, from providing the best education possible for each child, to teacher pay and tenure. The quality of public school education has been on a decline ever since. It is a statistically provable fact.
They negotiate their salary once a year.
“In my neck-o-the-woods, teachers by contract work 185 days a year.”
In my neck, they only work 180 days a year. That’s a part-time job by any reasonable definition. There are 249 “work days” in 2023. Subtract another 20 days for PTO and the average person working a full-time job work 229 days a year.