Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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Nominal teacher salaries may be reverting back towards the mean salary, but teacher compensation is not. Public school teachers in the US have a unique compensation structure:

1. They're salaried at a middle-class level (in a major metro like Chicago, the median teacher salary is $70k).

2. The get an extraordinary amount of time off. There are large public school districts where teachers have a contractual maximum of 190 work days.

3. Most importantly, many (most?) receive a defined-benefit pension plan. During the period of time this piece documents the teacher salary decline, virtually all competing jobs of every status lost defined-benefit pensions and switched to defined-contribution plans.

Further, the trend over the last 10 years has been towards tonier school districts paying spectacularly high teacher salaries. The perception in those districts is that a dollar spent on the schools (in any way) pays back more than a dollar in increased property values. So my kids at Oak Park River Forest high school have teachers --- not assistant principals, not coaches, not LD/BD specialists, just teachers --- making over $100,000. And bear in mind, if you normalize this back to a 50 week work year, that's closer to $140,000. With a defined-benefit pension.

And we're pikers compared to Buffalo Grove, which has several teachers making over $150,000.

So where are these numbers coming from?

A contractual maximum of 190 work days sounds a lot like 200 days a year, which is pretty normal (52 weeks with 4 off for vacation and 5 days a week = 190)

In California (I don't know Illinois) teachers get a pension, but DO NOT GET Social Security!

I see some clickbait articles searching about Buffalo Grove teachers, but those end up leading to data from ISBE. https://www.isbe.net/Documents/teacher_salary_14-15.pdf

The data from there doesn't come up to $150k even for maximums. They list $122-139k as the maximum from 2011-15 with median values of $67-74k.

The salaries for public employees of most of Chicago suburbs are public information. I'm not guessing: there's a web page that lists them all, by name. I know this because some friends and I were comparing notes on the salaries of teachers in our respective suburbs yesterday, on Slack. I don't have the link handy, but if you'd like to wager against me on this, I'm happy to take your money. :)

I do not understand your math on workdays. I am terrible at math, but it sure sounds to me like 48 work weeks in a year is 240 work days, not 200, or 190.

Yes I already responded that you are correct to the exact same comment on 200 days vs 2000 hours an hour before your comment.

I posted a link to exactly the salary information you are referring to in my unedited comment. They do not match those in the parent comment.

Sorry, I went through my browser history and it's Arlington Heights, not Buffalo Grove (they're adjacent and I get them confused). You would have won the bet!

What was the highest normal teacher salary you saw in Buffalo Grove? In Arlington Heights, it's $150,660.

Thanks for your understanding... we all make mistakes.

Cite on teachers/firefighters in CA not getting Social Security [1]. Amazing they get taxed for something they never benefit from.

The special-case where a non-teacher who paid into SS for years and then became a teacher losing out on years of SS he'd built up is very unfortunate.

[1] http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Ripoff-Social-Securi...

Also in CA, LAUSD I believe runs their schools year round. And that district alone has larger attendance and budgets than many entire states. But being both urban and higher cost, high attendance, and year-round has a weight that shifts the calculations for CA such that I suspect you can't do a back of the envelope calc and get an easy comparison.

190 = 5 × 38

thanks... an extra 10 weeks off for summer. it's 2000 hours per year that is typical.

Compared to 1975, though, women are far more engaged in the broader labor force. Back then, if you were a woman and you wanted to work, you could be a nurse or you could be a teacher, and that was about it. Yet teaching and nursing are skilled professions--your school district pays teachers quite a bit more these days in order to attract good teachers. There used to be more good teachers, so teacher costs were lower. So, too, with nurses. I don't expect that labor force engagement by women is the sole factor in "cost disease", but I bet it's one factor of several.

There are a lot of teachers in small towns in poor states making below-average money to offset the above-average costs in your [Animal name] [Nature feature] Chicago suburb.

My point doesn't hinge on Buffalo Grove teachers making 150k per year, although the trend towards suburban school districts paying this much (which was not the case 20 years ago) does offset some of Alexander's claims about teachers.

Even in rural school districts, teachers likely have a pretty reasonable deal: a reliably middle-class (for whatever region) salary, lots of time off, and a defined-benefit pension plan.

In rural school districts, teachers probably are getting a relatively better deal than other residents (compared to 1975), simply because of the hollowing out of the rural economy in the last 40 years.

Still, in the article, when he's discussing healthcare and education, labor force engagement was going off in my head like big flashing lights. I doubt cost disease has a single root cause, but I suspect this is part of it.

I also suspect that defined-benefit pensions play a big role, especially when coupled with increased life expectancy. Corps and unions mutually agreed to kick the can way far down the road in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I also suspect that regulatory capture and wealth disparity play big roles, too.

While your points are true, how are they different from the situation 10, 20, 40 years ago? I'd argue that, similar to salaries, other teacher benefits are about what they have always been. My argument goes against my experience; my wife is in the public school system, and benefits are weaker and cost more than they did 10 or 20 years ago, but I won't chase that too hard here as it is only anec-data.

The cost of a defined benefit pension have skyrocketed. Replacing 90% of salary after 30 years for life with cost of living adjustments use to be worth about 20-35% of your salary. Now it's worth 120-200%.

As for cost, do you mean that the decline in prevailing interest rates requires setting more aside for a given annuity, e.g. pensions? It that where you get your estimations for worth (as distinct from cost)?

One simple reason is that in the last 50 years, DB pension plans have been required to fund an additional 7 years of lifespan for the average pensioner, and that's up from ~11 years, so it's a very substantial increase.

Management costs for DB pension plans have increased while management costs for market-based DC plans have plummeted (these price increases also track the rise of Vanguard and low-cost mutual funds).

Also, in that time period, a lot of major pension plans were financed based on calculations about market returns and interest rates that didn't bear out. But one of the defining attributes of a DB plan is that its payments are predictable to future pensioners, so all those financings had a ratchet effect.

Yes, my estimates are the present value of the liability the pension plan is incurring. It's what a pension plan would have to save to be fully funded.

Pension plans are currently not allowed under federal law to fully fund themselves because that would be so expensive it would disrupt federal taxation. Instead we are constantly building up future pension crises that will have to be paid in higher taxes and economic chaos later.

Is it reasonable for us to suggest that teachers working long hours (grading doesn't do itself) who are professionals get a crappy summer job? When you divide the salary into 190 days the tacit implication is that their pay should be cut and they'll be able to make up the difference. No one is going to pay someone a professional wage seasonally.

I'm not opposed to requiring that they put in the same number of hours over the course of a year that everyone else does but it's not like they're programmers who can go freelance for a few multiples of their standard salary hourly rate.

Along with pensions the other big non-cash compensation cost is healthcare. Teachers, and public sector workers in general, tend to have health insurance plans of a type that have all but disappeared in the private sector. Low or no employee contributions, low cost sharing at the point of service, broad networks and formularies, no gatekeeper, and even some out of network coverage.

OPRF is infuriating. We lost Greenstone to Francis Parker because his year in china allegedly reset his seniority -- the real reason ofc was they just didn't like him. The dude wrote a novel that nearly got turned into a movie. And his china stories were great. Probably made the other overpaid goons feel threatened.

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