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Comment by _coveredInBees | Hacker News Reader

I understand the frustration, but I think it is absurd to expect teachers and school administrators (who are woefully underpaid, especially in the Bay area) to accommodate working parents by working extra hours just for the parent's benefit. It's a hard enough job as it is, what with the poor pay, large workload, dealing with entitled, helicopter parents and the diminishing societal appreciation for their contributions and importance to society.

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I'm not saying teachers don't deserve to be paid more, but I was surprised to see how much Bay Area teachers make. It's public info for public schools.[1]

In Santa Clara County, with no experience, starting salary is $71000. It increases on a schedule each year up to over $131000.

Honestly, the job security, structured pay, and 3 months vacation per year is a pretty darn good deal.

[1] - https://www.santaclarausd.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ash...

You picked an outlier. Most schools districts in the Bay Area (including San Francisco) have starting salaries for teachers in the $50k-$60k range. And in my experience, teachers work a lot more than 40 hours a week. I picked 3 randomly below:

Redwood City: https://www.rcsdk8.net/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?modul...

San Mateo: http://www.smfcsd.net/en/assets/files/Employment%20and%20HR/...

San Francisco: https://archive.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/contract%20a...

Thanks for the additional data points!

Enen with tech workers complaining about the high rents, I wonder how bad teachers fare? Or are these districts in "cheap" areas?

San Mateo and Redwood City are both expensive, but not as bad as SF. One article reported median rents were about 2.4k, which makes sense. There a few places advertising lower rents, but not many, and at that price you are giving stuff up. SF is worse.

Another issue is the commute. Traffic is really bad, so finding a cheaper place farther away from work will cost you in time and energy, especially if you have to cross a bridge.

It's so bad that some districts, including San Mateo, are building their own housing for teachers. https://edsource.org/2019/in-need-of-teacher-housing-more-ca...

https://sf.curbed.com/2019/8/20/20814179/housing-crisis-teac...

2.4k on rent when you're making between 31-3700 post-tax is kinda brutal.

> 3 months vacation per year

This perception is usually pretty inaccurate. There's no time given during the school year for essentials like curriculum development, continuing education requirements, training new teachers, etc, so that eats up time during the summer 'break'.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/07/myth-o...

> Klem says she’s spending the rest of her summer this year attending meetings, developing school curriculum, helping train new teachers, and contacting families of her students, among other tasks. Past summers, she says, have been equally busy: graduate-school coursework to complete her master’s degree (which isn’t required but can mean higher pay), classroom organization or relocation, and so on. While some of these responsibilities come with a stipend, teachers say they’re relatively negligible given how much time they take—no more than $1,000.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/16/hold-on-before-you-get-too-j...

> As an educator you constantly have to be on top of trends, so it’s not like it’s just six weeks of me laying by the pool,” said Sara Holloway, a fifth-grade English language arts teacher from Monongahela, Pa.

> “You are taking classes in the summer, or you are reading material, or you are conferencing or blogging with other teachers, you are planning for the next year,” she said.

I appreciate the perspective that you’re coming from, but I come from a family of educators. They do have occasional in service days over the summer and obviously are expected back at work a week or so before classes start. Other than that, it very much is a three-month vacation, one that shaped a large part of my childhood.

The distribution seems bi-modal. My wife was a teacher, and she had maybe one free week the whole summer, between development classes, curriculum work, and so on. On some summer days I would leave work at 7pm and then join her in her classroom until 8 or 9pm where she was just finishing up a 12 hour day.

Then there were other teachers at the school who took off on the last day of school and you didn't see them again until the week before school started. Those were the teachers that were still teaching material from 30 years ago that all the parents dreaded their kids getting.

Similar experience for my wife. Some teachers just don’t give a shit and never update their curriculum or materials and repeat the same drivel over and over. She on the other hand spent the majority of her free time developing new material and kids actually looked forward to her lessons.

I would get suspicious in my wife was going to work for 3 months while her colleagues enjoy their vacation

My understanding is that it's also often heavily weighted to the early years, unless you have someone else's lesson plans to use (and even then, you probably want to prep and maybe do a dry run).

Just like any job, if 90% of what you're doing is new to you or something you have to develop yourself if vastly different than if 10% of what you're doing is new or something you're developing yourself. Given the actual in class time doing the lesson plans is fairly static, that means the non-classroom hours of the day, or your own time, is what is required to make up the slack.

I imagine teachers of fields that have lots of changes (or of districts or states that adopt whole new curriculums) have it worse than some others. At least if they care about doing a good job.

It would be interesting to hear what your family members have to say about their first few years teaching compared to later years, and what period your memories correspond to.

I wrote a whole story about a family member being incredibly inefficient in preparing for a class she got (but was completely unqualified for, save for a masters in education). It turned out to just be really depressing, so I'll just say this:

1. Teachers in positions new to them probably do have more work to do

2. A lot of that work may be due to their own inefficiency having not yet learned the role.

3. That inefficiency ends up being paid for with a) time and b) stress, including family stress.

4. Even still, I sincerely cannot remember a single time in my childhood where we were not traveling all summer long.

5. Fortunately budget cuts can end nonsensical programs and save everyone the hassle :-/

What a weird period of time that was.

As an engineer, I have to pursue a lot of "keeping up with trends" on my own time. I spend my own time setting up my computers. I get a stipend for professional development, but I bare the bulk of the cost and time (most of the time). I often work a lot more than 40h. I think all that you mention is not uncommon for professionals who want to develop their skills in a continuous manner. I could say the same for lawyers, business people, etc.

Sure, but no one claims you have 3 months of vacation when you are spending time doing those things...

My mother was a teacher in Ontario. She insisted her salary should be looked at over a 12 month period, not ~9.5 month. Even though for those ~2.5 months, she was free to do whatever she wanted, including taking on additional full time work (though, more often than not, she vacationed).

No, but this is my free time and how I use it. If I chose to do that during my vacations, no one would be "well poor you, you don't really have 4 weeks of vacation a year, since you decided to pursue professional development during these weeks". People would simply say that I chose to use my free time to do these things, and some of these things are quite essential to my continued employment.

The line between that decision being made freely vs. being forced by labor market competition or other economic reasons is pretty fuzzy.

A young teacher still getting their masters and fighting for tenure will probably put in some work, yes. Young people in any profession will try to get out ahead of their peers early on.

The idea that most teachers are attending conferences or blogging about teaching all summer is odd though.

I come from a family of teachers. My mother started teaching later in life, got her Masters and was hustling when I was a teenager. After a decade teaching, I don't think she spends even a minute thinking about school during the summer.

My dad is now retired and has probably the best sort of pension imaginable in this country. Certainly nothing like that safety net will ever exist for me. I can't really compare his experience though because it was a different generation of teachers. He was very involved with his union too.

Teaching just seems like a varied profession based on where you are. I hear and believe the talk about teachers being undervalued, underpaid, overworked etc. But my family has done very well for themselves back in NY, with a lot less uncertainty than a lot of other professions.

My teachers in suburban Michigan had starting salaries in the $70ks... in 2007.

Starting salaries in North Carolina -- in 2019 -- are $35,000 for first year teachers. The top end is $58k. It's embarrassing.

http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/fbs/finance/salary/sched...

Also, for a married couple raising a family, it's hard to beat a job that, by definition, coincides with the kids' schedule. If one spouse has a decent full-time job, the additional income from teaching is almost incidental compared to the flexibility of working the same hours and location as the kids.

There’s a 20:1 to 30:1 ratio so are you suggesting it’s better for 20-30 working, single parent families? Maybe the government should pay teachers more and pay less on defense and we’d have a more productive society.

In an ideal world, routing money from defence anywhere makes for a more productive society (except maybe black jack and hookers - and I am not even sure on that).

Of course investing into the future (kids and environment) has the biggest long-term impact and should be top priority.

I think lately western governments (other than the obvious example) have figured out that it's a much better short term play to simply allow immigration to boost the economy rather than longer-than-their-term ideas like education.

I doubt that is true in the current xenophobic administration.

I've read multiple studies that the biggest influence in a kids success in school is their parents involvement.

Don't make the assumption that throwing more money at teachers will improve our schools. Zuckerberg tried that with little success, as have many before him.

I'd rather a focus on ensuring every kid has a healthy meal at the table. A support group who's invested in tbe individual kids success. A family that encourages and supports during the best and worst of times.

Arguably the "advantage" well to-do middle class families get.

A quick peruse of Google scholar’s highly cited journal articles suggests it’s not as clear cut as you suggest:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

I don't doubt your main point, but your main example does not support it. How much of Zuckerberg's money trickled down all the way to teachers? From what I remember seeing reported, most of it went to consulting and administration.

Parental involvement is not the same thing as "made up obstacles so that parents have hard time in work or additional pointless chores". It is not the same as "mom got forced toward different work track as otherwise kid is in trouble in school".

Oddly, parents ability to work is actually beneficial towards kids ability to eat regularly and healthy. Especially for poor famillies.

Maybe people could vote for politicians that prioritize education over defense?

How about those parents who need it, just take their kids to pre-school care, so everybody else can have a normal night's sleep?

That assumes a single school employee covers the entire span. Our school in NYC had different shifts — so 7am class teachers were not the same ones doing late afternoon classes.

To me this sounds line a great way to give teachers non-curricular overtime pay. It’s good for all parties involved to have a face-to-face relationship, and a way for our public school teachers to supplement their income if they so desire.

That sounds great, but where is that extra money to pay the teachers going to come from? Propose raising property taxes to cover things like this and a large portion of the people wanting this will suddenly vanish.

That sounds great. Property values will vanish too and be realistic instead of the current bubble in some areas of the US. cough silicon valley.

At many schools the before care/after care staff is not comprised of teachers. But I bet some might sign up for extra hours either before or after school for extra cash.

Sure, but all the activities the OP complains about - parent teacher conferences, kindergarten/classroom tours, etc. all require the actual teachers involvement so it seems perfectly reasonable that those activities would occur during regular working hours. Plenty of schools offer before/after care for families with working parents so that they can drop-off/pick up their kids before/after work. I don't think that is an issue for anyone. But I think it is unreasonable to expect teachers at schools to work outside normal hours just for the convenience of parents with jobs who can't even take a few hours off work for things that they obviously deem important. That's an unreasonable burden to place on teachers, and in general seems like a waste of taxpayer money if they had to be paid overtime just to accommodate a small fraction of parents.

Are parent/teacher conferences not built into the schedule as working hours? If I recall correctly from my mother, who was a school teacher, they did these twice a year and those eight hours were counted as one of the days that they worked in their contract. Maybe that is not universally negotiated.

As she was a special ed teacher, she also had a whole slate of other meetings with parents to go over IEPs and testing, and if those were before 8 am or after 3 pm, she was paid an hourly rate for those meetings.

Overtime pay for IEP meetings is definitely not the norm everywhere.

It is unreasonable to work with assumption that parents don't work or penalize kids for parents (moms to be precise) working.

I can’t speak to administrators, but for teachers factoring(especially pensions) in total benefits and a 10 month work year this isn’t really true.

School is publicly funded child care, thats how it started and it hasn't changed since inception. School needs to cater to working parents better since thats its whole point.

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