Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

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The median pay includes those who teach summer school and earn extra money.

Therefore, median pay for teachers cannot be equivalent to someone with a bachelors degree and unpaid summers off.

Furthermore, the baseline should not be calendar days but hours worked. As willcipriano's own reference #1 points out, teachers "may also work evenings and weekends to prepare lessons and grade papers."

If teachers spend their afternoons doing extracurricular activities, and evenings and weekends for grading lesson planning, giving a 55 hour week[1], while the average for someone with a bachelors degree is 40 hours[2], then the HS teacher makes ~15% less per hour than the hypothetical median bachelors degree holder. [3]

[1] https://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/Gates2012_ful... (from 9 years ago) says teachers spend 10 hours, 40 minutes at work.

[2] https://www.thebalancecareers.com/what-is-the-average-hours-... says "Those with a bachelor’s degree or higher worked 8.0 hours per day, while those with a high school diploma worked the most on an average day: 8.2 hours."

[3] HS teacher, $62870 / (39 weeks * 55 hours/week) = $30.40/hour. Median bachelor's degree holder: $72830 / (50 weeks * 40 hours/week) = $36.42/hour. (36.42 - 30.42) / 36.42 = 16.5%.

You'll need to include the expected payout of any defined benefit retirement plan as well to improve the quality of your comparison.

And working after hours / weekends is highly dependent on intrinsic motivation of the individual teacher. Many lower quality teachers successfully avoid much or all of that unpaid work, especially in situations where they have strong job protections (tenure)

This is goalpoast-moving. You should include the average payout of retirement planning in the private sector, for comparison. I will be shocked if we find a substantial difference, or advantage to the teachers.

>Many lower quality teachers successfully avoid much or all of that unpaid work, especially in situations where they have strong job protections (tenure)

We'll need citation for this too.

It's just part of the total comp calculation so it's a no-brainer to include in a good comparison.

And defined benefit plans are quite desireable and becoming rarer, and have tended to be more stable in the case of market downturns.

On the citation question, I don't have more to provide than experience from relatives who are teachers. It's quite well known that many bad teachers are quite entrenched, and those that realize their level of employment protection thread a good needle in terms of avoiding unpaid labor. It just requires caring about the job and results less, and many situations can push teachers towards feeling this way such as burnout (which can come from earnestly trying too hard and suffering from too many unpaid hours grading, etc.), the fact that there is basically no monetary incentive for good performance (everyone's on the same pay ladder generally based on level of education + years teaching), dysfunctional administration (at the school and/or district level), lack of good colleagues, etc.

I want you to understand how terribly unconvincing this is. You seem to have an agenda, but not necessarily the facts to support it, so you're engaging with hand-wave-y generalization and, "Just trust me"-level rhetoric.

This conversation began with concrete numbers, and if you want the initial presumption to stand you're going to have to end with them, too.

Certainly. My point is that the analysis presented here is far from complete. As I commented at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28826659 , "Many people have studied this question, resulting in publications with conclusions which are all over the place"

"Intrinsic motivation" means that individual teachers are being underpaid for their work, compared to market values.

Tenure doesn't really exist like your sketch. Teachers for grade N+1 really don't want unprepared students from grade N.

Even if it did, why should so-called "motivated" teachers do unpaid extracurricular work, and work from home in the evenings and weekends. Certainly if they used their motivation to get a part-time job they could make more money.

Agree with much of what you're saying

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