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Comment by vkhn | Hacker News Reader

I am willing to accept that there are studies and statistics that seem to contradict what is commonly accepted. I'm also willing to accept a lot of the evidence here that the problem is not nearly as bad as believed.

This was, however, clearly written by statisticians that have no teacher friends or family. If they did, they would have asked more relevant questions of the data. For example WHY do teachers work "on average 40.6 hours during the work week, compared to 42.4 hours for private-sector professionals".

My wife is a teacher, and I can tell you exactly why.

Also, I laughed particularly hard at "teaching jobs are not particularly stressful or unpleasant compared to other occupations"

Hilarious.

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My partner is a teacher. She does indeed work 40 hours per week on average, has extensive time off for holidays, has the full summer off (she doesn't work at all during it), has a pension that when she retires will easily fund her lifestyle and more, and is paid the median household income for the city. It's not an easy job, but it could be a lot worse. She was also given a signing bonus and scholarship that together meant she graduated with $0 of student loan debt.

Pensions, bonuses and scholarships seem to be exceptions.

Median income is also a poor indicator.

Pensions for teachers are certainly common. I grew up in a completely different part of the country and all my teachers also had pensions. I'm not sure how the median income is a poor indicator -- she makes as much as the median household does for the city.

In some states, teachers don't pay into Social Security, so their pension/retirement plan is in place of that. At least this is the case in Maine.

It's especially bizarre that the rules also penalize drawing on spousal survivor benefits.

For a long time there was a bizarre loophole in Texas. Apparently, the decision whether or not to pay into Social Security was made on a per-school-district level. Most districts do not, so do not receive Social Security. Some do, and those retiring from there did get SS. The super-secret trick was to resign from your current position, somehow work for a week or so at one of the minority of districts, then officially retire and collect both your normal pension and social security. I have no idea how it actually worked, I just watched a couple of teachers of my acquaintance do it.

I believe the loophole has been shut down for several years.

> My wife is a teacher, and I can tell you exactly why.

Which is?

They do a ton of work at home outside of school hours.

But according to this study, they aren’t and are only working ~40 hours. So who’s misunderstanding, this study that used time diaries from teachers or what the other teachers say? Both sources are self reported. I was expecting this study to ignore the extra hours that teachers put in away from the kids, but they seem to account for that.

The "article" was produced by a neocon think tank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute

It's a "study" in the sense that a blog by the American Tobacco Association (fictional entity invented for the purpose of this argument) produces "studies" about the "harmlessness of tobacco smoking".

I am a high school English teacher in a suburban district outside a large midwestern city. There is a large variance between how much work members of different subject areas bring home. I certainly have colleagues that work their 40 hours and don’t spend a minute more thinking about school. The nature of my work is different, and I typically work 50-60/week.

Also for reference, I have been working as a teacher for 6 years and make just shy of 43k.

For the whole year? If you work 60 hours/week, 36 weeks/year, then you only work ~41 hours/week on average. School years are 180 days, for about 36 weeks. I know that teachers do work during the vacations somewhat, but, they also get substantially more time off than most other professional jobs in the US.

"Substantially more time off" is probably the wrong way to look at it when you don't get paid for the two or three months off.

That's a good point. Really, you could just say that they have a seasonal part time job, but when they do it they are paid like professionals.

This might not be a problem if there were another part time job that really worked well for getting paid in the other months, but that seems difficult.

I have a choice whether I would like my annual salary paid over 10 months with no pay in the summer or over 12 months. My annual salary doesn’t differ one way or the other.

I think the comparison was median annual income and median days of vacation per year. It doesn’t matter too much if the pay is distributed as a single annual lump sum or paid out every hour.

does she work summers too? winter break, spring break?

Do these questions have a point?

Does that matter? If we're talking in terms of annual salary, the fact that they "don't get paid" over the summer is irrelevant; it's just the same amount of money distributed on a weird schedule, isn't it? All things being equal, you'd rather have the $60k job that had "an unpaid summer off" than the $60k job where you got paid all summer, right?

At least the graph in the article is "adjusted" for the 10-month work year. Typically in such discussions, that would mean they multiplied teacher salaries by 12/10 to make them "comparable" to other professions.

Your $60k job is actually a $50k job with an unpaid summer off.

Are you sure about that? When the Washington Post says that CPS teachers make >$70,000, I'm reasonable sure (but not 100% sure) that's their actual annual compensation. When my kids old school district reports high-school teachers make $110,000, I know for a fact that's their annual comp, not something normalized to their "working months".

Good point. I'm being hyperbolic. But in these discussions you do have to be careful that someone hasn't annualized a 9 or 10 month salary like the article.

> This was, however, clearly written by statisticians that have no teacher friends or family.

Or it's paid propaganda by whoever. In fact, I think this has a higher probability to be true.

I'm married to a teacher and the whole "article" is bullshit.

> Or it's paid propaganda by whoever

I was curious about the site's owner (American Enterprise Institute) and looked them up on Wikipedia to give me context for reading the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute

Half my family are teachers, at least. They spent a huge amount of time outside of a "standard" 40-hour work week preparing lessons, grading, etc. It's a tough profession if you don't love it.

ROTFL

I knew it. The "article" is 100% propaganda.

I don't doubt it's a tough profession, but I have trouble squaring how unattractive it is with stats like the small percentage of applicants the Chicago Public School system actually hires, compared to their very large pool of applicants.

I can't be sure, of course, but perhaps more teachers are trained every year than are capable of being employed (due to policy or whatever else). Perhaps Chicago is seen as a more desirous place to live and work than other places. Perhaps the Chicago Public School system has a good reputation or good policies and many people want to work for them.

What possibilities have you considered?

Paid propaganda or not, I hold that these men have no teacher friends or family, or they would not have written this.

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