I am their son. I am college educated, I make $50,000 per year on average and I've been laid off 3 times over my 6 years of post college employment. I have never been offered a 401k, which is a particularly ineffective retirement tool anyway.
How are teachers underfunded again? Maybe in certain underfunded neighborhoods, but not all. And their employment is pretty secure.
1. Pension spiking. Happens for teachers, though not as much as other public employees.
2. The pension should be funded from investments, not some optimistic guess as to the return on those investments.
3. It should be easier to fire a bad teacher. I realize this is hard, but we've all heard the stories. In my excellent school district, you apparently have to be caught sexting teenagers to get fired, even though a lot of people had reported the offensive behavior, many times over many years. While most of my son's teachers are excellent, a few of them shouldn't be anywhere near students of any sort.
This is a problem with most public employees though. It's not necessarily unique to teachers. Try to fire a bad cop for instance. Just won't happen. Or a bad database analyst at your State's Department of Administration or whatever. You just can't do it.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/07/24/ca...
But the pensions are driving housing prices and property taxes through the roof around here. I luckily found 2 other roommates to live with me in a 1br apartment far outside the city, and we're all paying $650 each. Property tax accounts for 33% of our rent contribution.
GDP per capita is a stupid measuring stick for salary (except that an annual one below it is bad), since you are averaging eco onic activity across everyone, including those not working and outside the labor force (children, prisoners etc.)
> But the pensions are driving housing prices and property taxes through the roof around here.
I'd like to see your argument for how pensions are driving those two things (especially given that California has limits on the latter.)
So, they stay in NY for the good doctors and paid-off house and soldier through the cold weather. All of this wouldnt be a big deal if NIMBYism wasn't a thing, but it is.
Population on Long Island continues to explode as people commute by train to NYC to avoid exploding rents there. Building a house or remodeling a house on Long Island is extremely, mind-blowingly expensive and regulated due to the local town governments in Huntington, Oyster Bay, Manhasset, Babylon, Brookhaven, etc. I have tried really hard to get any town to permit me to build a 100k house on a 40k lot of land- nope, sorry, we only allow massive houses built out of expensive materials here because we want you to pay as much property tax as possible.
Holy MOLY that's a lot of money!
Out here in "Flyover Country", (Wisconsin), most teachers wouldn't even make half that much. And I'm assuming by the way you described her salary, that none of that included any of the benefits! That's an incredible amount of money for a teacher. I would think a lot of teachers would like that salary.
I'm pretty sure you can safely assume that your mother is nowhere even CLOSE to being the norm for teachers across the nation. There are many, many teachers out there who are very much underfunded.
Any school district on Long Island NY will have minimum salaries of like 60-70k I think. 90% of property taxes here (~10k USD per house) go to the school district.
It unfortunately shouldn't be a surprise that someone in Wisconsin paying $600 in property tax per year also has a school district with teachers making 40k, which, once again, isn't even a bad salary for the profession and value delivered. Maybe I'm just jaded, but 13 years of schooling qualified me for barely gainful employment. I could have home-schooled myself for way cheaper and with the same outcome.
I live in the #2 salary district in upstate NY. The 50th percentile salary is about 75k and the 95th percentile is 95k. Pensions are usually (final average salary over 3-5 years) * (years of service / 60), and are free of state tax. If you retire, you have different options, and full payments to both spouses reduce your benefit by 15-35% depending on age of your spouse.
My cousin is a high school teacher with 15 years of work. He makes ~$65k and gets a $5k stipend for coaching two sports. (ie. working 12 hours days September-March)
So, at 55 she retired with an after tax pension that was quite literally equal to her after tax salary. When you factor in commuting costs, she was paid to retire early.
The whole point here for me is the guaranteed nature of this employment. It's incredibly hard to be fired. If teaching children is such a valuable societal tool, we shouldn't be restricting the number of teachers to x and their salary to y.
We should encourage 1000x people to be teachers and pay them 0.03y
As for individual teachers "sitting fat [on] the money"... of course they aren't. Average teacher salary in California (according to California Teachers Association) is $78k -- and California is a very expensive place to live. FWIW, the CTA chiefs are making $300-400k+ and CTA controls a $300+ million annual budget. There's definitely plenty of money sloshing around the system, it just doesn't make its way to the teachers.
Teachers and other public workers have definitely created for themselves a bubble where they're insulated from the competition and stresses of the private sector, and they've done that at the public's expense. It's not a scam, but it's not innocuous either.
At the end of the day, tax money is a scarce resource. Money that goes to providing retirements for teachers more comfortable than what people with similar qualifications could get in the private sector is money that doesn't go to school lunches for hungry kids, etc. Teachers use the plight of disadvantaged kids to get more funding for schools. But that funding goes primarily to paying teachers, who are relatively privileged to begin with (being college educated and disproportionately white).
(Which is not to say that everyone shouldn't have a comfortable retirement--I'm all for raising taxes to Norway levels and funding a proper welfare state. But until we have Norway levels of tax dollars rolling in, our current expenditures on public employees is a misallocation of resources.)
No wonder why some people fight to maintain the status quo!
It's not, though.
The systems needed to deal with the social problems outside of schools that create difficulties for schools are chronically underfunded (and often designed poorly, as well), and teachers in many districts have impossible jobs as a result, but education itself isn't underfunded.
But “the schools are broken” is a more mentally manageable idea than “the entire socioeconomic system is broken”.
Consider a scenario where there are two retired teachers for every working teacher. To the working teacher they are underpaid. To the voters they are overpaid. The problem lies in the middle. If you stopped paying retired teachers you could triple the salaries of working teachers. Both parties would be satisfied with this arrangement.
Of course retired teachers would hate this and rightfully so. They were promised a pension and now you're denying it to them.
It calls into question the structure of compensation. Throw their money into a 401k rather than giving them 80-100% pay for the rest of their lives.
On the other hand there's evidence that teacher collective bargaining wastes hundreds of billions annually.[3]
Just because they're not conspicuously wealthy does not mean that they're blameless or virtuous or unsuccessful as a special interest group.
[0] https://www.city-journal.org/html/no-teachers-are-not-underp...
[1] http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~kamurali/papers/Working%20Papers/Do...
[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/19/teachers-much-more-than...
http://time.com/money/5228237/teacher-pay-charts/
http://www.nea.org/home/12661.htm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/08/...
Of note, teacher salary comparisons should be made to those with similar education attainment and should take into account the many hours they spend working outside of the school day.
Teaching does have its downsides, but I know a lot of people who became teachers or stayed teachers (like my mom) because it can give you a great work life balance. You’re off during the summer when your kids are out of school and your holidays mostly correspond with thiers.
When we got married, we were an “instant family” - my wife had two kids. We also got laid off at the same time before we got married - we worked together. I ended up with a contract job and she ended up with a job with crazy hours (nights and some weekends). That didn’t work for us. She took a significant pay cut to work in the school system at a job she liked a lot more and she had the same schedule as our sons.
She has a stable job with good - expensive benefits. That allowed me to jump around from contract to perm back to contract and chase jobs solely for the money without worrying about benefits or the stability of the company.
I know a small business owner whose wife works in the school system for the same reason - benefits.
There are other non monetary benefits to being a teacher - especially in a two income household.
If another school came in the same environment with the same socio-economic issues would the outcome be that much different?
The whole charter movement at least in the south is an attempt to funnel public money into private either for profit schools or “faith based education”.