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Comment by cmiles74 | Hacker News Reader

There's been some surface coverage of the US shortage of teachers for a while, yet we haven't seen much movement in terms of compensation. Maybe there has been a push to get people into the field but I haven't seen it.

IMHO, it's worth keeping in mind that this about more than the stress of the pandemic. The increasing costs of student loans (and the cost of servicing them after graduation) may also make teaching positions less attractive and, perhaps, unsustainable.

Here is a random article from before the pandemic.

+ 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/06/teacher-shor...

And one that is more recent.

+ 2022: https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/05/us/teacher-prep-student-short...

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Wages alone won't do it.

You have the greater forces of an industry that conspires to exclude one gender and all but one ideology. The shortage is self-inflicted. Exceedingly few people are being allowed to do the job.

Edit: downvote away but the numbers don't lie. Male elementary school teachers hasn't passed 18% in decades (it's even worse in K-3 where we're talking low single digits) and there are multiple news stories covering the reasons. If you don't think men aren't being chased out of that profession then you don't know any teachers.

I don't really think it's a conspiracy or ideology (lol). Teachers pay extremely poor in the vast majority of states in the US. I mean a scrum expert makes more than an elementary school teacher.

Wages absolutely have everything to do with it, why deny it and try to make it a political issue (lol)?

Few people do the job because it's an extremely bad deal. You will make more as a bartender than you will as a teacher, with the added bonus of a restaurant manager willing to kick out unruly guests whereas a school admin will likely side with the parents.

Typically the jobs that are most useful to society pay extremely bad (janitors, garbage collection, teachers, nursing assistants, dock workers, delivery people, etc). I'd checkout bullshit jobs manifesto if you haven't"

https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

Teachers make 13% more than the average salary across the U.S., yet public perception is that they are horribly underpaid. No one is getting rich being a teacher, but they are certainly paid a decent wage. It's a hard job but most jobs are hard. I know a ton of school teachers. It's true they put in extra work each night but every single one of them has the summer off to relax and recharge. They are also free to work another job in the summer to supplement their salary.

https://www.business.org/hr/workforce-management/best-us-sta...

National average is such a massively useless metric when we have such incredible variety in cost of living across locales

Shouldn't demand for teachers be roughly correlated with where everyone else is located? It's not like with tech where the employment is concentrated in particular areas.

To say nothing about the differential between someone in their first year and their 30th year of teaching. (At least, I hope there's a differential! I haven't looked.)

The “average salary across the U.S.” also includes workers both in their first year and their 30th year of employment.

Right, but knowing how much someone gets at starting vs how much they get at 10, 20, 30 years is helpful too.

Is there a bulge of experienced teachers getting 100k/year that pulls the average up? Does the pay range max out at 80k no matter how long you are there?

This data is more useful than the average.

> every single one of them has the summer off to relax and recharge

Tell me you don't know anything about teachers without telling me, etc.

"Relax and recharge" is hardly the story for most teachers. Those salary averages you cite obscure the reality that teacher pay is often determined by degrees and certifications. When do teachers pursue those, so they can advance past the lowest band? That's right: summer. Many have to make up professional-development days just to stay at their current level. (How much mandatory structured professional development has anyone here had to do since they started their careers?) A lot of curriculum development happens as unpaid summer work. Then there are summer jobs to make up budget shortfalls (exacerbated by having to pay for their own supplies during the year), reconnecting with families they hardly got to see during the year, and so on.

There are other highly demanding and poorly paid jobs, to be sure. One could make a reasonable argument that teaching is not uniquely bad. On the other hand, trying to argue that teachers are doing great because some get 13% above average for all those extra college years and they all get summers off is counterfactual to the point of dishonesty.

Teachers may make 13% more than the average salary across the US, but the job also requires a graduate degree, which often requires a year of student teaching that is unpaid.

If we use your argument about wages, teaching "should" only require ~2 years of college (~63rd percentile education level).

What about only public school teachers?

That would be interesting to see. In my experience, many private schools actually pay less.

My partner works at a private school where the students pay more than a typical university to attend - lots of business and celebrity parents. I was surprised to find out that some of the teachers are indeed paid less than they would be if they worked at a public school. If they've worked there a long time, then their pay is significantly better, so there is incentive to stick with it at one location.

However, the perks are better. For one, if they have children, they can attend the school for free. They also get very sophisticated lunches that only cost them $5/day.

Private schools usually pay less (they aren't unionized) but the working conditions are slightly better.

"Wages absolutely have everything to do with it.

"Everything" is too far. My male friend abandoned teaching after doing his student teaching and earning his license. It had nothing to do with pay. He took a lower paying job in a more expensive area. He said the school policies were terrible and the too many kids were misbehaved and most were uninteresting in learning.

He didn't say anything about gender issues, so I assume he didn't experience any, or that they weren't noteworthy.

Because despite the low salary men still want to teach. The reaction to that desire to teach is suspicion. Men are literally demonized in this profession. This isn't "making it political", it's the accepted reality of the profession.

in new zealand men are practically not allowed to work as teachers for that reason.

this is a shame really. teaching is the one profession where gender parity should be enforced by law because kids need the rolemodels.

i spent a year in a US highschool, and the teachers i had there were fantastic. my teacher in US history was most enthusiastic, and i enjoyed the class despite failing it.

that was a few decades ago. and already then it was known that teachers don't get paid well. my conclusion then was that the one good thing that comes from low pay is that in order to become a teacher you have to really love it.

> my conclusion then was that the one good thing that comes from low pay is that in order to become a teacher you have to really love it.

I wonder if the people cooking at fast food restaurants or janitors cleaning bathrooms or people stocking shelves at wal mart really love it. And does loving a job necessarily correlate with being able to do the job?

the difference of those jobs to being a teacher is how much education it takes to get there.

you don't spend years in college to become a janitor.

and as for love correlating with ability. it's up to the teacher-training programs to weed out those incapable of teaching. i don't know how it's done in the US but elsewhere teachers have to spend many hours in classrooms under supervision before they get their own classes. a big part of teaching is classroom management and there, love and enthusiasm make a big impact.

> Teachers pay extremely poor in the vast majority of states in the US.

You hear this over and over and nobody ever provides numbers, they just assure you it's horrible.

The NEA has great numbers on their website: https://www.nea.org/resource-library/teacher-salary-benchmar.... Let me post the US average here:

    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Starting | Top Bachelor's | Starting Master's | Top Master's | Top Salary |
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | $41,770  | $60,381        | $45,391           | $70,279      | $76,540    |
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can check some numbers, ranked, by state: https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salary-in-every-stat...

Numbers are not going to capture the terrible quality of life at work for many teachers. Plus all the extra hours they work outside of school.

There's also a very long set of holidays.

Dont forget about the vacation and PTO ontop of the holidays.

I would gladly take a 20% pay cut to get the same perks.

So why don't you? Your employer would almost certainly be willing (source: I have successfully gone through this kind of negotiation myself). If they're not, there are probably other employers looking for the same skills. Or was your claim merely convenient rather than true?

I'm a tool designer for a small company. The company doesnt have the manpower to cover abcenses that long.

I could probably negotiate that if I left for a bigger company. This would also likely require a move.

Teachers often have to do teaching work over the holidays or attend continuing education. Or they have to work their 2nd job because teaching doesn't pay enough.

LOL all you want, but I assure you that my school district has a policy of not hiring male primary-grade teachers.

If you're in the US then you have a slam dunk case in regards to sex based discrimination. This is why title 8 has been codified into law for over 50 years (with even more protections added to it).

https://www.eeoc.gov/sex-based-discrimination

Please contact a local attorney as this is a slam dunk case if they are truly discriminating based on sex.

What do you win by bringing such a case? They still aren't going to give you the job.

You're going to be spending years in the courtroom rather than engaged in your career. It's lose-lose.

Also you're a non-working teacher with no money versus the complete resources of the State. LOL good luck with that.

Don't be so foolish to think that going to court is an easy answer to problems. Court battles last a long time, especially if one party has vast resources AND/OR is an unreasonable person.

My family has been in court suing each other since 1989 without end. Appeals are not completely exhausted yet. Tens of millions have been thrown away at chasing a couple of million. Lawyers have gotten rich off us. Newspaper articles have been written about our family fued. Don't be stupid.

I think the community at large prefers female teachers and trusts them more around children.

It's a good thing that sex-based discrimination is illegal then.

Reframe your statement around race instead of gender and it should be obvious what a disgusting opinion that would be to hold.

Morality is about community relations and disgust on any side of the equation tends to make people leave. An attitude as strong as community-wide disgust may render one morally ineffective in promoting community progression.

I'm trying to point out what I think is the most important demographic of stakeholders that is responsible for perpetuating the gender imbalance in the industry.

>Morality is about community relations and disgust on any side of the equation tends to make people leave.

something tells me that if similar discrimination was applied in the opposite direction (eg. "the community trusts male police more", or "shareholders trusts male CEOs more"), there would be government interventions to fix that "attitude".

I'm a man working towards a masters in childhood education (elementary school) in New York. I have gotten some surprised looks, and people who assumed the teacher must be someone else, but nothing I would class as hostility. I suspect most female software developers experience much worse.

Speaking of, if you think the skewed gender ratio in teaching is evidence of a conspiracy, what do you make of the gender ratio in software development and other engineering fields?

Women are more represented in software engineering than man are in elementary education. This was even more true when I started working in IT nearly 25 years ago. I don't know any women who have been automatically assumed to be a child molestor just because they're a software engineer.

As for software engineering itself, it's mostly a crappy thankless job that is only offset by the pay. The hardest part of the job is not quitting. I do it because I don't want to do anything else.

Anyway, you're still just studying to be the thing that we're talking about here. Let's talk after you've been on your own and working for 2-3 years. That's about how long my cousin lasted as a first grade teacher before he gave it up for construction. Also in the NYC area.

When my mom was my age her job options were: Nurse, school teacher, secretary. Either those or be a nun. She wasn't allowed to wear pants.

The "conspiracy" or "ideology", if any, was that until recently only men could get all the other jobs.

Don't think swinging the pendulum of discrimination to the other side does anyone any good.

Of course not. But I don't see that happening here. It's not like it was 50/50 in the past and now we have 80/20, eh?

FWIW, I know someone who works at a local elementary school and there are male teachers there, none of whom are being "chased out".

Compensation in the US can be complicated.

Some rural districts near me are offering houses and cars in lieu of actual dollars. These districts are chronically understaffed and quite poor. So other forms of value have to be transferred in order to attract teachers.

Not that it does any good really. The houses and cars tend to be in bad condition/s, and then there's a fun little federal tax burden you get for being gifted such items. That and the rural districts tend to the end of the road for a teaching career. Since the pay is so bad, you can't save up to move back to a city district, or get more professional credentials, or advance your career in any real way. That and you have to live in a really small town as an outsider that doesn't really 'belong' there.

I feel for those districts, but the math is the math. It's not worth it to become a rural teacher if you have other options.

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