I don't know what world you're from, but I want to live where everyone "knows" that teaching is easy and lucrative.
It's comically wrong. People choosing education for that reason are in for a rude awakening. Many of that sort figure that out during their student-teaching phase, I suppose. Lots of teachers also leave within the first few years, and it's pretty much never because they found it too easy. It's a hard job, with an abusive strain of "you should make this sacrifice—for the children, you know, and of course we won't compensate you in any way, because we're not going to sacrifice for the kids, don't be silly" running through it, and bad pay, especially if you've got the kind of mind, interpersonal skills, and work-ethic we'd hope the median teacher would have.
Reports I've heard of truly bad teachers in-the-wild are mostly ones who are power-tripping jerks who like being "liked" by (some of) the kids (and who are typically fairly dumb, besides), not ones who are hanging around for an easy job where they can sponge off the taxpayer, because that's not really what it's like. The bad ones who stick around, it's not mainly because admin can't get rid of them, but for the same "admin has no idea WTF is going on with them" visibility-problems that are also common in private industry, plus they aren't necessarily totally bad at the job, in the ways that are being measured. Teacher efficacy measurements keep being attempted, and keep turning out to be so noisy they're nearly useless—even ones you'd expect to work, turn out not to, when you look at the statistics. That part's an unsolved problem that, believe me, plenty of teachers wouldn't mind seeing solved (they don't like their bad co-workers, either) though none of them like it when crappy solutions are pushed, since, you know, they don't actually work and are highly likely to punish/reward practically randomly.
They don't? The government publishes the names of all government workers with incomes >$100,000. All of the teachers I personally know are found on it, and they aren't special outliers. The same teachers also collectively own one of the world's largest hedge funds.
For perspective, median employment income is $38,000. $100,000 puts one in the top 9%. Is this some kind of twist on the no true Scotsman, where no matter how much a teacher is paid it isn't enough?
[1]https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_211.60.a...
With respect to the world? Yes. No doubt teachers in Niger are making pennies a day and most teachers somewhere in between. But with respect to here? No. That is very much typical.
> With how important it is
How important is it? This is the most educated place on earth, according to the OECD. What do we have to show for it? Presumably you live in another part of the world. When you think: Educated utopia, no doubt this is where you think of (I am curious if you guess right). What stands out about it?
> I think teaching should be a competitive and well-compensated field.
This is contradictory. Competition drives down wages. Monopoly is the way to fortune!
Teaching here is supply managed. The government controls how many accredited teachers are produced each year, and has reduced the number of would-be teachers allowed to be accredited in the past when there was too much competitive pressure. This creates an Old Boys Club that keeps the hobos who would drive down wages out. As such, they can demand just about anything they want, hence being amongst the top earners.
About the only job that might pay more is software developer (if just barely), and only because software developers have figured out how to scale their work. Teachers are reluctant to scale.
> Those salaries are above the median, but not as much as I think they deserve.
If all the income in this jurisdiction was evenly divided amongst the working population, each person would make approximately $60,000 each year.
While an economy need not be zero sum, it will be zero sum if there is no change in behaviour. As a thought experiment, if we assume that teachers want to keep on teaching the way they always have, who do you want to take from in order to pay them more?
You can break $100k here, but it requires a PhD or a couple master's degrees, and for you to have been in so long that you're near retirement. What's a starting teacher make in your area? How does that compare to others with bachelor's degrees? The useful comparison isn't overall median, it's what someone with the skills we'd hope even a middling teacher had, and a degree, could be making elsewhere. I can tell you that's definitely more than teachers make, at least here, which means their pay sucks. Lots of those jobs are less stressful, too.
$60k first year, $80k in year 5, $100k by year 10.
> How does that compare to others with bachelor's degrees?
$50k first year, $55k in year 5, 10 year information not available.
But isn't this like asking how does the pay compare to others who take a vacation during the summer or some other irrelevant metric? Maybe things are different where you are, but here we can clearly see in the data that there was no change to incomes as people started attaining bachelor degrees – incomes have held as stagnant as stagnant can be – so it is not like a bachelors degree has an impact on pay. Is there relevance to the question?
It is true that the school system works to filter out those with disabilities and other life struggles; factors which do impact earning potential. Are you asking with the intent to see if teachers make more than someone with down syndrome or some such condition?
$60k's not so bad to start. IIRC it's still like $38-42k here—in a city and its 'burbs, not rural districts. They're slowly adjusting to the fact that low-end wages shot way up & inflation is hitting hard, and now their pay, which was just sad-making before, is absolutely pathetic, and their 1.5% annual bumps an insult, but they're not adjusting fast enough. Staffing's getting really tight and lots of teachers have left for 25-50% raises and less stress in other industries—and, go figure, the ones best-positioned to do that are the best teachers. Many districts are dropping to 4-day weeks to cut costs, better deal with the still ongoing substitute shortage, and attract more teachers. We're leaving for a state with pay more like what you mention, because we don't want our kids attending schools that are experiencing a slow-motion catastrophe—this state's gonna be in for a rough time in the coming years.
Overall median is $38k.
But, again, bachelors degrees have never shown to have any bearing on income, aside from the aforementioned filtering mechanism, so what makes it wild? It is not surprising at all that regularly functioning, able-bodied, people are going to make the approximately same amount of money. The productivity potential across them is approximately the same. It is clear that those with disabilities and other life struggles which impact productivity do make less than the typical, able-bodied person, and understandably so.
What would be wild is if someone's hobby they engaged in for a few years during their early adult years made a radical difference.
> What would be wild is if someone's hobby they engaged in for a few years during their early adult years made a radical difference.
For real. Messing with .ini and autoexec.bat files so I could play vidja led me down a path that did more, ultimately, for my lifetime income than nearly all hours spent on education past elementary school. It's weird.
If it were a thing, it could be a whole thing, but since it has never been a thing...
What does have a measurable impact is supply management. Artificially constraining the number of workers allowed to work in a profession does boost incomes where sufficient demand is found. Think doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. And teachers (here) are also a prime example of exactly that. The government sets quotas for how many new teachers are allowed to teach. You could be the best teacher in the world, but if you aren't among the chosen few, you cannot legally take on the job.
Because such quota oversight is often administered through colleges and universities, you do find some conflation out there. But you can just as easily maintain a quota system outside of the school system. They are not intrinsically linked. We have examples of that as well.
Areas that are hard to fill (technical classes, especially) will sometimes see allowances to any random hobo, but one must still be blessed. Simply having the desire and ability to be a teacher does not permit you to legally be a teacher.
Stands to reason that where there is more freedom for anyone to be a teacher that the pay would trend lower. Supply and demand, as usual.
This off-the-wall shit is part of why people leave teaching. Being constantly criticized by people living in a fictional world, and blamed for tons of things that are simply made-up or that you had no say in, gets old.
Teachers are getting to be in short supply because people aren't choosing the job, because it's kinda shit in much of the country (and it's extremely shit in a whole lot of districts). It's not as if there's a strictly limited set of residency slots strangling supply, like in medicine. Not enough people want to do it, given the offer on the table. That's the whole story.
> Stands to reason that where there is more freedom for anyone to be a teacher that the pay would trend lower. Supply and demand, as usual.
Some of the places with very lax standards for becoming a teacher are nonetheless struggling to fill positions. The standards aren't the problem, the overall deal—work conditions, stress, pay, seeing the profession demonized by talking heads on TV and your own neighbors—is just not good enough to get people to sign on the dotted line. You're not going to get more people signing up to teach who you'd like to have teaching without making the deal better—it's got nothing to do with quotas or whatever.
Yes, much like the dairy quota system. The government anticipates how many teachers will be needed and only blesses that many to practice. For sure, it sometimes gets things wrong. Quotas were reduced considerably a few years back because there were too many teachers being produced, which was impacting pay. For what $60-100k is worth, it is actually less than teachers were making before that mistake (or "mistake"; some government assemblies are less friendly towards teachers than others).
> This off-the-wall shit is part of why people leave teaching. Being constantly criticized by people living in a fictional world, and blamed for tons of things that are simply made-up or that you had no say in, gets old.
Okay. What off-the-wall shit might that be?
> Some of the places with very lax standards for becoming a teacher are nonetheless struggling to fill positions.
Struggling to fill positions, or there isn't demand for the positions? Saying "Boy, it sure would be nice if we had more teachers" is no more demand than a 14 year old kid with $100 to his name and a poster of a Ferrari on his wall imaging having one of his own sitting in the family's garage. That's merely dreaming. Very much not the same thing as demand. Only demand is significant here.
> it's got nothing to do with quotas or whatever.
It doesn't sound like you have a teacher quota system in place in the part of the world you exist in, so that goes without saying. Obviously there is no universal standard here. Different jurisdictions are going to have different rules.
But it is clear that supply management does artificially increase wages, and teachers here (not the world over) leverage it. Why do you think that virtually everyone agrees that monopolies/monopsonies are bad for buyers? Why do you think tech companies want to build "moats"? Exactly, because constraint in participation is how excess money is made.
> Struggling to fill positions, or there isn't demand for the positions? Saying "Boy, it sure would be nice if we had more teachers." is no more demand than a 14 year old kid with $100 to his name and a poster of a Ferrari on his wall imaging having one in his family's garage. That's merely dreaming. Very much not the same thing as demand.
They're cutting electives, dropping 20% of school days, and increasing class sizes because they're having trouble finding teachers. Regardless, vacancies remain, and schools rarely open positions they don't need—education quality and workload for the teachers they do have just get worse, typically, when positions aren't filled. I don't think that's "I wish I had a Ferrari" levels of need, but actual need. Inflation, the hangover from Covid stress that's been the final straw for a lot of teachers already on the fence about staying (it was not a happy, kick-back-and-relax time for most teachers—quite the opposite) and the current political winds have hit the profession hard.
I understand the pay is dismal, so that tracks. Pay would be dismal here too if there weren't the artificial constraints propping up incomes. Teaching isn't unpleasant enough to see some kind of natural supply constraint emerge. It is a job a large segment of the population is willing to do.
> They're cutting electives, dropping 20% of school days, and increasing class sizes because they're having trouble finding teachers.
That doesn't mean there is demand. If I start eating more rice and beans, that doesn't mean I'm in the market for steak. Class sizes are a hot topic here too. It is not because we can't come up with enough teachers, it is because the current government doesn't want to hire more teachers. Are you sure that is not what is going on there too?
They didn't suddenly make these changes because they want to provide worse education, certainly. It's true that demand is weak in the sense they're not paying enough to keep teachers in the profession, or draw back those who left—it's taking some time for school districts (run by elected school boards, at least in much of the US, if not in all of it, and with funding largely determined by public votes on taxes and bonds) to catch up with the current "going rate" for the level of education they used to provide, just four years ago, at the tail of a decade of stagnating wages (pay freezes that were never made up, so, cuts; inflation adjustments that didn't quite keep up with even pre-pandemic inflation rates) punctuated by the pandemic, an inflation spike, and a sharp jump in bottom-end wages in the rest of the economy. I suspect many districts will ultimately not meet the new rate, and education quality will settle into a new, significantly worse level in much of the country (a "new normal", if you will) but right now they still want more staff than they're able to obtain, as they try to return to the state of things pre-pandemic. Once they accept the new situation and stop so-trying, yes, I think it'd be fair to say that demand has dropped, as they'll be aiming for a lower level of quality than they are now. Maybe they'll surprise me, though, and voters will decide to make up the ~30% drop in total comp teachers have seen (around here, at least) since 2005 or so. Doubt it, but maybe.
So, in a sense, I think we're headed to what you're describing as "reduced demand", but right now schools are still trying to get back to pre-pandemic staffing levels, though their funding has yet to increase enough to make that happen—and I doubt it will. I expect education to become/remain a lot worse, instead, as average teacher quality drops, class sizes grow, time in class is reduced or remains at already-reduced levels rather than rebounding, and opportunities offered to students are withdrawn.
Certainly, the problem isn't that the supply-side of the teacher equation is constrained, in the US, but that the career's just not as appealing anymore (which, again, I can see why you'd describe that as insufficient demand)
Many families will eat some of what could have been increased school funding, in the form of higher childcare expenses; taxes won't go up much or at all; and public education will get worse, is my prediction for the mid-term trajectory of public education in (at least much of) the US. Probably going to be lots of opportunities for startups to grift public dollars for ineffective computer learning systems, though, as schools desperately try to compensate for all of that without raising taxes (or reducing administration overhead...). Maybe cheap "para-educators" monitoring classrooms while kids watch YouTube lectures? Who knows. Probably lots of things will be tried, and none of them will help much, if history is any guide.
I'd expect a boom market for tutors in the nearish future in the US, as the above state of affairs becomes more widely-appreciated. Not many parents can afford actually-consistently-better-than-public-schools $25k+/yr private schools, or are willing/able to homeschool, but quite a few can afford some tutor hours each month—and they're going to need them, if they don't want to lose ground. Kids whose parents can't do that, or choose not to, will join a widening cohort of students whose future prospects are... grim.
(for bonus fun, we're speeding toward a healthcare cost crisis, and we've got a retirement crisis—a paucity of retirement savings, in every generation after the "Boomers", with worse at-same-year-of-life savings rates for each subsequent generation and already a large gap between "X" and "Boomers", that is—all set to hit more or less at the same time. I reckon we'll have beat the odds if we still have anything resembling free and fair elections by 2050, what with all those stressors on the system and the increasing sophistication of political-legal games-playing, plus stuff like the gradually-worsening housing supply & ownership consolidation problem)
So, what would voters hope to get out of the deal?
As you might have guessed, here is, according to the OCED, the most educated place on earth. From your outsider perspective, I am curious: How does this part of the world shine in your eyes for being so educated?
While our culture unsurprisingly has a strong bond with schooling, it has largely become religion, right down to threats of ending up in purgatory if you don't buy into the message. I don't think we are able to even recognize what we get out of it anymore, and largely envy what the US has instead, so I am quite interested in how others see us.
Well, if teacher total comp has been declining (health insurance getting worse without getting cheaper, and often while getting more expensive; wages not keeping up with inflation, especially post-Covid) and the headline says "scores decline again..." (emphasis mine) I'd think, scores going back to what they were when teacher compensation was better, is what the voters might hope to get out of the deal. I think some other things might also need to change, but I don't see a path to that outcome that doesn't involve significantly higher pay.
But, maybe the US doesn't need stronger public education. Maybe it's not as important to democracy as some suppose. Maybe it's not as important to having a strong developed-world economy as some suppose. We aren't the most-educated place on Earth, but it's still possible it's true that we don't need to educate our children any better than we are now.
What is the value proposition in seeing higher scores? It does not appear the population sees value in scores in general. I am not aware of them dumping millions into pinball to see someone reach a high score, for example.
Compensation comes from trade. Someone else has to give in order from someone else to get. If you are going to give up something you hold near and dear, you are going to want something in return. How much is one really going to give up to be able to say "Look ma, a larger number!"?
Is that worth an extra hour at work? One less vacation to your favourite destination? One less cup of coffee? I struggle to want to give up anything for a number, frankly. I guess I'm just not that enthralled by numbers. The are a useful tool, but just a tool in my mind.
No, I went a state school here in New York for a graduate degree in a program that included many teachers that were seeking to get their Master's degree (which is required to teach here in New York within 5 years of becoming a teacher). All of the teachers in the program were actively employed as teachers at the time of their enrollment. Most of them were barely literate. At least two I would classify as not literate. Not a single one could be characterized as "well educated". None were especially intelligent. They were all nice, well-meaning people - but they were certainly not the best and brightest.
>I don't know what world you're from, but I want to live where everyone "knows" that teaching is easy and lucrative.
I certainly didn't say it was lucrative to be a teacher (though it can be after many years in the system). Most of them were paid very poorly. But it is a stable career. And it is easy to keep your job - which doesn't mean it is an easy job to perform (it isn't).