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Comment by sirmarksalot | Hacker News Reader

I looked that up on the BLS website, and while you're not using the same units as them, your numbers don't seem to match up.

According to BLS, the median pay is $53,230 per year, which would be closer to $26.50 an hour, assuming a 40-hour work week.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-s...

Maybe the Forbes article you're referring to about is only counting classroom hours, which is a pretty absurd notion. Teaching is a full-time job, and any figure based on an assumption to the contrary is going to be flawed. Not meaning to straw-man you, it's just that without a link to the article in question, I can only speculate where your figures come from.

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Teachers work 9-months out of the year. Here's the site: http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenmeyer/2011/12/22/the-teach...

This is a myth perpetrated by people who believe that since the kids are on holiday, so are the teachers.

That's a detail that's sort of glossed over in the article. I'd like to see some evidence for that. While I wouldn't be surprised if teachers work significantly less during the summer, I'd be very surprised to find out that they don't work at all. It rings of the assumption that classroom time is the only work time.

Even if they don't work all 12 months of the year, is it feasible for a teacher to take another similar-paying job during the off months? If not, then hourly pay is not a good indicator of income. I can't imagine a person who is only going to be available for 2-3 months, and who has split responsibilities with classroom preparation, would be able to get a non-menial job to fill in the gaps, somewhere along the lines of $15/hour.

So taking $15/hr * 40 hours (optimistic) gives $600 per week, multiplied by 13 weeks gives $7800 for the summer. Add that to the $52000 estimate from BLS, and you get $59,800 per year, which averages about $28 per hour on average.

The correct figure is 38.5 hours/week for 9 months/year.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

That's about $33.5/hour for wages alone. It also ignores the value of gold plated health care + pensions, etc.

"Gold plated" (sic) health care?

Tuck in your pants. Your bias is peeking out.

(Edit after being downvoted, in an attempt to be more constructive): Seriously, you seem to have an animus against teachers having decent health care. What's your problem with that, and why do you feel it's appropriate to label their quite average health care plans as "gold plated", as if they were unfairly receiving more health care than they are entitled to?

It's always easier to hate people in your own class who have fought for rights than to fight for those rights yourself.

Sorry, I have to get back to believing whatever the 1% wants me to believe.

38.5 hours is … unrealistic. It also ignores the fact that health care and benefits have been slashed heavily in recent decades so while there may be some older teachers enjoying the fruits of stronger unions, a prospective new teacher is looking at something roughly equivalent to what any software engineer would receive as far as benefits go. Salary is probably lower unless you're comparing a teacher in a very rich / urban area with a software engineer well outside of SF/NY/LA/etc.

According to the NEA, that's only scheduled hours, not actual work hours.

http://www.nea.org/home/12661.htm

That certainly matches the teachers I've known; they put in a ton of non-classroom hours, and often put in a fair bit of their own money.

A Gates Foundation survey puts it at 53 hours per week:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/survey...

And for teachers involved in extracurricular activities, the average is over 11 hours a day.

The numbers I cited are actual hours worked "last week" according to the BLS's American Time User Survey. It includes work performed "at a work location", "at home" and "at another location" (I assume this last one means starbucks).

You'd have known all this if you bothered to read even the introduction.

Did read it. I didn't see them resolve the scheduled hours versus hours worked question.

And since the Gates Foundation numbers better match what every teacher I've ever talked to says, I'm going to run with them.

Paragraph 2 explains that it tracks "activities that they engaged in".

Yep. Not convinced that they are really tracking what I'd like them to track.

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