I remember a piece in the San Jose Mercury News (I've referenced this before, but haven't been able to locate it. I expect it was never put online) from back in 2000 about full-time public school teachers living in San Jose homeless shelters because they couldn't afford to rent or buy in the city where they worked.
I expect that in expensive areas, teachers still need to commute hours to work if they want to teach there.
That's appalling to me. Given that teachers, second only to parents, have enormous impact on the development of our children.
As with anything in the bizarre municipal-county-state-federal labyrinth that constitutes the US public school system, things vary dramatically from place to place. One issue with many districts' pay tables is that they have too few steps, which is not good for "older members." As someone who was a public school teacher for six years, I also think many teachers would challenge your opinion that "teacher pay overall is just fine."
I'd like to see data on places where, as you imply, unions decide who gets the "worst classrooms" - when I was teaching in Chicago Public Schools, I heard that was once the case in a bygone era. Is this actually happening in 2021?
Housing and Healthcare the 2 expenses that single handedly make America unaffordable. Food, travel and everyday activities are affordable enough. 4 year Student loans can be kept under $50k, if you work part-time to offset living costs and go to state schools.
$32k is criminally low, but the $60k number doesn't sound that bad to start. The US is large, and land is practically free. If the US just gets its act together, and starts building dense housing, they can offset a huge part of this divide. Ofc, they won't do that, but it is important to make the distinction between salaries being too low, and houses being too expensive for no good reason.
I'm not saying teachers are fairly compensated, just that you'd probably have to determine compensation county by county
First off First year teacher can be paid pretty low depending on what grade it is, and if they are even working full time. Many first year teachers are not full time
In my city where the median Household is somewhere around 55K, there are several high school teachers making 80K+
I would urge you to look up the actual salaries for teachers with more than 3 years experience, most teacher salaries are part of the public records, there are databases out there that will show individual salaries.
If we are going to debate if teachers are underpaid we need to start with an actual fact base.
Finally the fact the position requires a degree has no bearing on the rate of pay.