Teacher Pay and per Student Spending
nea.org
nea.org
These numbers are just averages though - are long-time teachers dominating the pay scale and new teachers are getting paid a pittance?
Staffing of teachers is a hard job, some districts have full time staff just trying to fill the classrooms.
My point is that different studies can have different methodologies, still be valid, and without digging deeper can be misleading. You'll need more than "I believe the average is" to really know what's going on.
In West Virginia things are more bleak.
Then, due to shortages (caused by low pay), they removed 2 years around 2010, so now its only 5 years - a master degree. They made the passing grade at the exam so low for some teachers (math and physics teachers) that you can treat it like it doesn't exist, and while the current government won't do anything next year because they have interest in makebelieve the past 4 years the education recruitment process hasn't been a disaster, you have talks about diminishing the requirements to a bachelor degree (they will wait until after the european elections to start pushing the idea imho).
So most active teachers in place today had to study 7 years before working with kids. But when i will check the requirement in two-three years, i'll be able to say "they're pretty well paid for people with bachelor's degree!" too, event id it wouldn't be the reality for most teachers.
https://www.gadoe.org/Finance-and-Business-Operations/Budget...
Going with the state whose schools I'm most familiar with. In GA those are the base salaries. Districts can increase the pay if they have the funding. Sometimes for specific fields only, math teachers in one county were getting paid almost 50% extra for a while due to a severe shortage a decade or so back.
If you don't get a graduate degree most teachers will cap out at T-4 or T-5, which this year maxes at $58k and $66k with 21+ years of experience. If you earn through an EdD [0] you'll be at the T-7 level which is $81k. $23k or 15k difference
[0] Doctorate of education, often a non-dissertation degree with a large practicum component, tedious to earn more than hard to earn.
Yes there has been a lowering of standards to get a teaching certificate in many states, but that's because they are desperate to do anything possible to get more teachers in classrooms without having to raise pay. Not because it's a good idea. Many teaching certificates are handed out "provisionally", and give you a few years to earn whatever is actually required, while still allowing you to actively teach in a classroom.
That was also my understanding.
I have read lots of complaints from seemingly smart teachers about having to waste their time on getting one of those (but none of them worried about being able to do the work and get the degree).
I have also read lots of entitled stuff from seemingly very dumb teachers with said degree who thought they were smarter than other teachers because of it -- and smarter than pretty much everybody out there without a "doctorate" as well.
And I've read research that shows that the degrees (bachelors/masters/"doctorate"/phd) actually doesn't matter much for people's teaching abilities...
This is irrelevant to determining whether or not a given occupation is underpaid (or overpaid).
Supply and demand determine the appropriate price, and if you think there are insufficient teachers of insufficient quality, then the price is too low. Similarly, if you had a too many well qualified people clamoring to be teachers, then the price would be too high.
However, given what we know about what teachers have to deal with on a day in and day out basis, plus having to forego vacations during the school year and having an extremely rigid schedule, I would assume people with options (proxy for high quality) to forego teaching if the pay was only “average”.
And that “average” is for professions requiring similar levels of time/stress/injury risk/time off/flexibility/upward potential/etc, so a simple mean or median average of all US working adults’ pay is meaningless.
The only relevant question is are the people who are teachers now of sufficient inherent quality and of sufficient motivation? If not, then there is likely a problem with the prices (since it seems evident across many, many jurisdictions and management levels).
Also does not help that violent and disruptive students are somehow not automatically kicked out of school.
Yes, this is bad
> plus having to forego vacations during the school year
? Teachers don't typically work during christmas, spring break, etc, do they? Plus they get the entire summer off? Whatever the arguments around sufficient salary, worker protection etc, I can hardly see vacation time being a factor. I'd absolutely kill to have summers off.
And those summer weeks are often the business travel days. I much prefer traveling on off peak days, and would hate being restricted to travel during the busiest times of everything.
As for other holidays, the teachers I know seem to work a lot of hours at home, so not necessarily a “holiday”. And the same problem exists, only being able to do things at busy times. Which isn’t bad, but it would suck if that was the case for 40 straight years.
So you are saying it is a good comparison? Or less strong? Do you have an example?
This is almost certainly not true, given that comp would be state by state and county by county and district by distrct.
>3,500 school districts (28.6%), employing nearly 300,000 teachers still offer a starting salary below $40,000.
>They also say "23.2% of school districts pay beginning teachers a salary of at least $50,000. These districts employ nearly 1.3 million (42%) teachers."
That is, it's not just long-time versus new teachers, it's district to district: not all districts are the same size and some big districts pay better.
Average salary also seems to correspond pretty well to blue-state-ness in the top 10, with the exception of Alaska, for obvious reasons.
New teachers can more easily move to where there is better pay/demand for teachers. So I think they tend to balance out a bit.
In our district, starting teacher salary is $59k and so we see a lot of young teachers.
I think you've expressing an underlying bias here that "average" is a fine pay for teachers.
You should at the very least be comparing to the median salary of professions with similar educational requirements.
Average bachelor's degree is ~$30k for in-state public universities, not accounting for interest. Master's in education will be ~$40k.
Starting salary with a Master's in most states is ~$45k
And around 95% of degree holding individuals do less work than the average teacher, and almost all of that 73% are less qualified and probably in less debt from degree courses.
My son is currently choosing what he's going to move on to after he finishes school, and I'm honestly recommending military service over teaching.
It's a hard job, with working hours that are beyond ridiculous, and you end up spending some of your salary on school supplies for your classroom and for your kids. Not to mention keeping your desk drawer stocked with snacks for the kids that don't have food.
We need to wake up. If we want our children to be babysat, then keep things as they are. If we want our children to be educated, then we need to attract the best to the profession. "If you can't do, teach" needs to be reversed.
A handful of student's expenditure covers a teacher's salary. Where does the expenditure for the other 25 kids in the class go?
There is a LOT of infrastructure. The schools have to be built, they have to be staffed(there is a fair bit of support staff, to keep the teachers in classrooms teaching).
From cafeteria workers and janitors to IT people and payroll, back office and grant people. High Schools might have a few thousand students that congregate there every single day, that's a small town. Our local high school's have a dedicated full-time HVAC person for instance, just to keep the insane temperatures outside from getting into the classrooms.
https://www.nycenet.edu/offices/d_chanc_oper/budget/dbor/sbe...
It just says:
Pct of Per
Pct of Public Student
Total Exp. School Amount
i. Teachers $10,124,379 32.1% 37.7% $9,914
2) Some kids with certain needs require one entire staff member with them at all times. There may be a few of these in a given school.
3) Somewhat more require something like 1/5-1/10 of one or (more often) two staff members’ time (think “special ed” rooms)
4) These figures may include serious outliers. Selective public schools often have very high per-pupil spending, and schools attached to correctional institutions sometimes register six figures of spending per student, to pick a couple examples.
TL;DR if we could suss out what’s actually spent on a “normal” student at a “normal” school, it would be way lower.
I bet if you go ask what those secretaries actually do during their day, you will find they are very busy doing lots of stuff that has nothing to do with the traditional "secretary" role. It was probably the only way to get it stuffed into the budget, so the actual work they do can get done.
Certainly some Administrators have actual secretaries that do traditional secretary duties, but they are few and far between in my experience. Most of the ones I've met do lots and lots of other things totally un-related.
As for multiple Asst Superintendents, that's totally normal, usually one is in charge of "back office" payroll, HR, the business end of things and another is in charge of education type things. At larger districts you might have 1/2 a dozen of them, all specializing in a particular area.
It varies state to state and district to district, but in general teachers get very good healthcare plans and a pension. When I compared notes with my teacher friend, I found that his benefits package would be worth about $15k a year (assuming the pension plan is well run). And let's not forget they only work 180 days a year.
While inflation has not been kind to their salary gains, it has been very kind to the pension gains. So the total compensation package has probably not changed much.
That's just for the academic year.
Then they work during the summer in preparation for the next school year, teaching summer school, attending their own continuing education courses or graduate courses, or working a second job to make enough money to make ends meet.
And most professionals do work more, but not hugely more. I'm in a middling org and get 50 days off a year between holidays, PTO, and sick leave (not always used, rolls over though). If I used all my sick leave I'd only work 210 days, just 30 more days than a teacher who manages to take the entire summer off. At a middling org.
Most summer prep is done by admins who are employed 11 months a year, and teachers get paid extra if they choose to teach summer school.
Lots of teachers also work summer jobs so they can be not-poor. Super common. (“But their wages aren’t actually that bad” 1 - in many places, yes, they are, and 2 - add a couple kids and a divorce and it’s extremely bad)
It’s also why so many end up doing MLMs.
Days are a poor measure here. Hours matter as well and teachers are salaried. They don't earn OT, but they often work more than their contracted hours without compensation. In that study the average was 12 uncompensated hours per week, assuming an 8 hour day over the 36 weeks of a school year that's more than 50 uncompensated days of labor.
I object to the claim (in my quoted section above) that teachers only work 180 days a year. They work more than that, either in the excess hours beyond their contracted hours, in the time they take without direct compensation to maintain certifications or earn graduate degrees, or the time they spend working a second job or summer school or running a club just to make ends meet.
There are a few particularly broken things about the current system. A worker's potential ineligibility to receive their spouse's social security survivor's benefits is a big one. It is not uncommon for the WEP to kick in and prevent a person with a defined benefit pension from receiving any of their spouse's survivor benefits, whereas if they had never worked a day in their life, they would receive it.
[0] https://www.aft.org/news/educators-fight-keep-their-social-s... [1] https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/how-w...
That's not really the area of friction. The problem is that very few people pay only into a defined benefit plan in their lifetime. The point of contention is the calculations involved when a person has paid into both social security and defined benefit plans. (or how much of the survivor benefit a spouse should receive)
In tech we talk about “total compensation” as opposed to “salary”. The same should be true for other jobs as well. Especially those with a defined benefits pension plan!
Basically, you'd need to figure out the excess ROI based on what they get out vs what they put in, relative to the market (or something).
I would much prefer a big SEP-IRA, or a 401k with a company match beyond the standard safe harbor 4% or whatever it is.
Government defined benefit pensions come with their own problems.
Arizona is at 12.29% each for employee and employer for a combined rate of almost 25%. https://www.azasrs.gov/content/contribution-rates
My hunch would be that some unions did well and others didnt, but it would still be difficult to understand the data without comparing to the tax base regions for the school.
the whole idea is poor. there's little benefit in putting pressure on teachers like this. all you're doing is unnaturally dragging their motivations away from helping kids grow into well-rounded individuals for the sake of them and society to earning more money based on some arbitrary goal dreamed up by a local bureaucrat
why would I assume that? because their motivations are not being skewed by an additional perverse financial incentive?
It’s interesting that you refer to this as a “perverse financial incentive” when we use performance-based metrics in pretty much every industry.
If the evaluation is known ahead of time, we'll just see Goodhart's Law in action ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law).
Not only that, but a huge part of "student success" isn't based on the teacher's performance. For example, if you give me a class of wealthy students whose parents have graduate degrees, it'll be a lot easier to teach them than a classroom of low-income students without access to resources who aren't set up for success.
In fact, school administrators could tip the scales toward teachers they like and retaliate against those they don't like even with "objective" measures. Let's say that we have a perfect test of student advancement - a perfect measure, can't be taught to, and can't be cheated on. I dislike you as a teacher and load up your class with all the known disruptive students. You spend your time on classroom management (controlling student outbursts, keeping students in their seats, etc) rather than teaching. This perfect, objective measure comes around and it turns out you're a terrible teacher! Your students aren't doing better than before your class. Except the fault of that is mine - I manufactured a classroom that was doomed from the start.
That's not to say these things don't happen in industry as well. I've seen managers give people they didn't like projects they knew would fail or gave them a team of under-performers to drag them down. However, it's kinda worse when kid's futures are in the balance.
Yes, there are certainly better and worse teachers, but it can be hard to determine who is doing well.
Considering the alternative is paying people simply based on how many years based on seniority alone, we should endeavor to use a system that at least attempts to take performance into account.