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Comment by msrenee | Hacker News Reader

Teaching pays nothing compared to CS, finance, basically most things you need a degree for. Those brilliant individuals who would like to teach have to decide if their passion is worth making less money than some warehouses are paying around here. Those who don't have the grades or abilities to reach for the higher-paid fields have less of a dilemma. We're actively selecting against the candidates who have more lucrative options. This is where the issue comes in where people start saying they should do it for the joy of teaching. That's easy to say when you're drawing a comfortable salary. Being tight on money sucks and passion doesn't pay the bills.

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I work in tech and would likely teach if it paid the same. My plan has always been to front load my retirement savings early in my career through tech so that I can take a lower paying teaching job when I'm older.

I’m in the exact same boat. One thing I enjoy doing is guest lecturing at local colleges in CS classes, around topics I have professional expertise in. If that sounds like something you’d like to do as well, I’d recommend getting involved in your local ACM chapter, as most college CS programs have an ACM tie-in.

Same position here, though I realized it a bit later in life. Currently mid 30s and hoping to be out of tech by 40.

It depends on where you're teaching; teaching is a terrible deal in rural school districts and in some states, but teaching in urban and especially wealthy suburban school districts is a pretty fantastic deal: it's a white collar salary (every single teacher at the public high school my kids went to makes over $100k) with a defined-benefit pension plan, ironclad job security, and more vacation days than any other profession.

It's not at all the case that teaching isn't competitive with other degree-requiring white-collar professions; depending on where you are in the CS/IT food chain, it's quite competitive with tech.

Defined-benefit pensions have become so alien to private market jobs that it's easy to overlook how valuable they are, or to forget that a lot of people are very happy to work towards a strong retirement.

My school district is in a middle sized city with a dominant land grant university. A starting teacher makes $40k. Requires both a BA and a teaching credential. Hours are long, and teachers spend a decent amount of money for out of pocket supplies, especially at some of the schools that despite level funding seem to get the short end of the stick.

IT in my area pays anyone with a pulse and basic computer skills $40k. A rookie developer from our land grant university can easily start at $60K with no experience. And that same developer can earn $100k with two years of good experience. Show me a 3rd year teacher pulling in $100k in my school district. No such unicorn exists.

The city doesn't have a DB pension, just a 403k.

Granted, the newbie teacher gets 1.5 months off in the summer, compared to 2 weeks PTO for the developer.

After 10 years, even assuming the teacher gets a Masters, the pay differential is huge.

I don't deny that there are teachers getting shafted all over the US; I'd just want people to know that the deal in many (most? all?) major urban school districts is surprisingly strong.

One suburban school district that you know of. I'm sure there are others. I'm not sure how you're extrapolating to many or all major urban school districts.

I've looked at a bunch of them (I have this argument somewhat frequently). But, sure: let's find some examples. What's a major metro where you think teachers probably get a raw deal? This is easy data to pull up.

I know OPS in Omaha doesn't pay crap. Last year's pay schedule started at $43k with a bachelor's, 47k with a master's, and 51k with a doctorate. Maxes at $71,400 with a doctorate. 2022-23 starts at $44k with a bachelor's and maxes at 75k with a doctorate.

I'm not at all surprised if teachers in Nebraska get a shittier deal than teachers in California or Illinois, but if you click around the financials for the DC West school district, teachers in suburban Omaha are routinely making 85k+. These teachers do not have doctorates. Note that the base salary of a teacher is just the floor on their compensation; they make substantial additional money from extracurriculars and in-school mentoring work.

Valley is not suburban Omaha. They're in the same county, but Valley is distinctly a separate city and not a suburb. Even with how far West Omaha has expanded, there's no one in the area that's going to call it a suburb without laughing a little. Is that the best you could find?

How about you look at the number of teachers employed by OPS vs DC West? They have one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school in that district vs OPS serving an area encompassing hundreds of thousands of residents.

You were excited about 100k/year in California? Please tell me that's not the Bay area where that still leaves them unable to purchase a home anywhere near the area.

You also understand extracurriculars are a lot of extra time and work for a bit of extra pay, right? One of the biggest complaints I've heard is that teachers are being forced into running extracurriculars because they already work way too many hours for the pay and for any kind of work/life balance.

I found DC West by looking at a list of Omaha suburbs, finding Waterloo, and looking up its school district. It's significantly closer to Omaha than Naperville is to Chicago, so yeah, I'm sticking with that being a suburb. If it wasn't a suburb, if it was its own city, that would make my argument stronger, not weaker.

I don't know what "excited" means. By national standards, I've been extraordinarily lucky; a $100k/yr comp package wouldn't excite me right now. But I can compare what teachers make to what other white collar professionals make, and I understand how to account for the rest of the compensation package --- a defined-benefit pension in many major districts (actually, a defined-benefit pension would light me up right now) and an enormous allotment of vacation days.

Speaking only to my local school district, which breaks comp out, extracurriculars are not a "bit" of extra money; it's as much as a 20% pay boost. My real point though is simply that the base salary is where most teacher comp packages start, and there's other things that go into it.

I'm not saying "teacher" is the best deal in the whole economy, but in major metro school districts, it's not a bad deal.

And, just to be ultra clear: obviously there are a lot of school districts, especially rural districts, where this isn't the case at all.

Alright, you pick the data you want to pay attention to and ignore the fact that the majority of teachers in the Omaha Metro are on the first pay scale I showed you. And go ahead and tell me that you know the lay of the land of an area you've never stepped foot in. Nice talking to you.

I have most definitely "stepped foot" in Omaha.

How do you know what degrees they have?

I know a lot about the Omaha area.

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