Teachers' Income

Why do you think that teachers don't work? Why, especially, do you think that teachers don't grade things? Who else is going to do it?

Imagine that a teacher has four classes, made up of 25 students each, and gives them all a homework assignment, a single sheet of paper with 20 or so questions. Let's say the subject is math and that the grading consists of simply checking to see whether an answer is correct or not. There are 100 students, so that's 100 sheets, a total of checking 2,000 answers. How long do you think it would take to grade those?

It doesn't seem like that much, but try writing your name 2,000 times and see how long that takes. Now, that one homework assignment would be only a single night of work; the papers were handed out on Monday, brought back on Tuesday, and have to be returned on Wednesday. The other nights of the week consist of a similar amount of work, except for when there is even more homework or homework of a different caliber that takes longer to grade. Imagine assigning your students a 3-page essay; it'd take hours just to read all of them, let alone judge the contents of each one and determine whether the student actually understood the material. Most teachers spend a lot of time, hours every week, simply grading things. It's part of being a teacher, and it's kind of impossible to escape it. The only teachers I've ever had that didn't assign homework was in college, and even then, there was only one professor that didn't assign any kind of homework. (And some people didn't like his classes because your grade depended solely on three tests given throughout the year, instead of a combination of the tests and copious amounts of homework.) I cannot even imagine an elementary, middle, or high school class without any homework.

As for doctors entering the field just for the money, I will admit that undoubtedly the majority of doctors enter the field out of some desire or concern for the well-being of others; however, that is not the case with nurses, who do a hell of a lot of work and who a patient may interact with more than a doctor. A lot of nurses are only in it for the money. I know this because one, most nurses in hospitals don't seem to give two shits about the patients and two, almost everyone that I've met that has gone to community college or some trade school to get anything necessary to be a nurse has said, plain and simple, that they decided to do so solely based on the potential income.

I watched waiting for superman couple of weeks ago, so my input might be incorrect due to hazy memory or biased information. yes, $50,000 is not much at all for the energy they put into teaching. The hours are long, the majority kids are not great, etc. Of course, due to inflation, the real wage of a teacher isn't great/well compensated.

then again, teacher union is powerful enough that teachers could have good benefit, like health care or retirement. Personally, I think that teachers should be awarded salary based on the kid's and the parents' satisfaction with the teacher (which is scored based on test score, the student's happiness, the teacher's teaching method, efficiency, etc.)

That's what Washington D.C. tried to implement. Teachers could CHOOSE to either have a fixed wage OR choose to be paid more based on their skill as a teacher. The plan didn't go into effect due to the teacher union's lobbying and many teachers' incentive to just have the system the way it is.

In the end, both the teachers and students are jerking each other off. teachers complain about kids, kids complain about school. I didn't have the best experience with public education and college.

Is this serious? I barely began the first post and I see that apparently $50,000 a year is little... Gods I only wish my father earned even half as much as that. Hell if upon finishing college(university?) I get a 1/4 of that I will be happy for a long time, when I finally marry and have children 1/2 would be great having it in it's entirety would be awesome...

That said, what exactly qualifies as teaching here. It is not exactly a function where you need be 8 hours in a row... But Assuming 8 hours on weekdays then $50,000 is reasonable. Sure we can make arguments for raise or decrease but in the end they all fall flat because there is always someone who gains less and needs more or someone who gains more and needs less.

It does seem like a good system to base a teachers wages by, but it is also faulty. Like you said, a majority of the kids are not great. I remember when there were kids who didn't like the class becasue they didn't have any friends, or they just didn't like being in school, and they just sit there and pout, and just give the teacher a hard ass time.

With grades, kids just don't give a damn. Me, I cared and I did exelent on tests, but there were other kids who never even bothered to prepare, thinking they could just make it up later.

Like I said, it's a good concept on paper, but on the field, not so much.

Basic economics. Teachers don't get paid higher because the amount they are paid is where demand meets supply. If there weren't enough teachers, employers would increase wage as an incentive. This is the distal cause, the proximate cause is that too many people want to be teachers for low wage.

I think there are a lot of schools that want to hire more teachers but cannot due to a lack of a budget. Class sizes aren't really low, so it doesn't make sense to say that there isn't a demand for teachers. It's more like the higher demand for teachers cannot be met but not due to a lack of teachers.

Also, I doubt teachers want to be paid low wages. I imagine a lot of teachers have to either accept low wages or not have a job in teaching.

Demand is restrained by funding available but what I said is still true. It's not that teachers are want low wages, it's that they are okay with them. They don't pursue other occupations and so employers can get away with paying them a low wage. For ex: "Why should I give you more money when there are 20 other people I can hire to replace you who'd be okay with the way I pay you now."

Solution: Discourage/restrain people from going into teaching and increase education spending.

By the way, $50k a year is not low pay. That's middle class and one can live comfortably on that salary.

Merit pay may be a good idea in some concepts, but there are several caveats to the current ideas for implementing it. The current reformers want to tie merit pay to standardized test scores. However, it is not clear that this is a reliable measure of teacher quality. There appears to be a large amount of variability. It doesn't make sense for someone to go from being an 80th percentile teacher to being a 30th the next year to being a 70th the next year. Such results probably mean there is too much noise in the model. This could be for several reasons:

-sample sizes that are too small
-noise in other factors(teacher quality is NOT the most significant predictor of how well students do in school)
-fluctuations in ELL and special needs populations
-and so on

It's possible that the models we are using now actually reward teachers who are statistically lucky or teachers who simply get to teach lots of economically well-off students with a minimum of special needs. If we want to implement merit pay, we need at a minimum a reliable way to measure merit. Not to mention test-based evaluation has other costs: namely more standardized tests, which cost both time and money.

Even so, teachers overall probably want more respect more than they want more money. People who go into teaching know that it doesn't pay great, and for the most part, they have accepted that this is a reality for the moment, even if they might work to change it. The low pay does lower the quality of the talent pool and force some people out of the profession, but overall, those who stay would probably be more interested in changes that resulted in more support, autonomy, and respect for what they do. Try asking some teachers what they find most frustrating about their work and I would bet you hear these things before you hear about pay being too low.

Wonderful deduction Sherlock, except there's nothing stopping schools from setting the same price, Cartel laws don't apply to them and it's not like you have such an overabundance of private schools out there as an alternative so if they set the price a teacher can do nothing but suck it up.

Frankly this is economics 101, i.e. the criteria for free market - which are not fulfilled in this case.

@Flaser

Supply and demand still works in the labor market following current economic models. You are also assuming that the number of teachers in the market is static, but people are free to choose their occupation making it a free market. If there is a shortage in teachers, school districts will have no choice but to hire teachers at a higher wage once they hit classroom capacity limits set by law. Why do you think science and math teachers get paid more to teach? Because there is a shortage in those areas of teaching. The same works in reverse, other teachers get paid less because they are a surplus labor force. If in general teachers get paid too little, then teachers would exit this occupation or have chosen another in the first place. There are also many different school districts within the same states which have varying wages; low-income areas have a higher demand than those school districts with smart wealthy students that all teachers want to work with.

I also reiterate that teachers still get paid a decent wage. They do what they love, for a wage that they have agreed to (by agree I mean to have known the typical salary range beforehand and still chose to be a teacher), and they get longer vacation time than most jobs.

Edit: However, none of the above should be taken as my opinion that I'm okay with the way American education is set up. If school districts have a shortage of good effective teachers than the typical thing to do is not to leave the classroom without a teacher but to fill this slot for a long time with an ineffective one. I find it also inefficient that we try to increase the number of ineffective teachers to keep classroom sizes small even though it is better for the students to hire better effective ones and keep class sizes larger. This works in other countries where teachers are carefully selected, keeping inefficient teachers from entering the labor market and deflating wages. Here's an interesting link about this problem: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/01/teachers
The policies of the school system also do not help to motivate students. For example in France, all students are told how their peers are doing and those that do poorly are embarrassed so that they will perform better. Do this in America and you get parents complaining about how it is harming students when in reality it is not.

I'm a survivor of the public education system and I have a few suggestions.

1. Abolish the department of education
2. Implement school vouchers
3. Break up the teachers union.

Department of Education: By removing education from the Feds hands we put the power closer to the community at the state or county level. When the power is shifted to the parents and local school boards the parents can't sit on their ass. If they want their child to have a decent education then they better get involved.

School Vouchers: If your school is terrible, leave. The majority of countries in the world tie the money to the child, we don't. We segregate children into schools based on where they live rather than any other factor. "Oh you live in a poorly performing school district? Sucks to be you". Yes, yes we can go on and on about how the schools need more funding but, we already spend more money per pupil than the rest of the world. All we are doing is throwing money into a black hole.

Teacher's Union: The contracts the union has essentially make it difficult to impossible to fire poor performing teachers. It wraps the school in so much red tape that it's simply easier to just shrug and pretend there isn't a problem.

All I need to do is point to New Yorks infamous rubber rooms to show the kind of asinine bullshit that occurs because of the union's deals.

In addition, the teacher's union has been fervently against any and all reforms that don't include giving them a pay raise

Don't get me wrong, I value teachers. I believe the Union officials are the real problem here. Take away their bloated salaries are all the asinine by-laws and contracts associated with it and we'll be making a step forward in education.

Yeah I agree that the department of education needs to go. More than 70% of taxes for education go to these fat cats on Capital Hill.

I live in the South, and the idea of education being placed into the hands of the community scares the hell out of me. My area is currently having trouble with getting certain teachers to stop involving prayer in school activities, and that issue is pretty clear-cut. There should be no confusion when it comes to education and religious practices and beliefs and what is and isn't allowed, but in the South, problems persist.

I genuinely believe that in my area, if the local community had the power to make decisions, all the schools would teach creationism in science class (and place more emphasis on it than evolution), we'd all have morning and lunchroom prayers (with someone over the loudspeaker reciting a prayer, not just a "moment of silence," which already occurs), and attending football games would be mandatory for all students (and of course everyone would have to pay to get in).

I'm not saying that I completely trust the government, but I sure as hell trust it a lot more than I trust the religious rednecks in my area.

Yeah, and plus, the taxes are going up nowadays. Not so good to them teachers out there.... :P

I live in the south as well and the issue you bring up is countered with

1) the constitution: If a government school involves prayer as a mandate or even implied mandate, sue them. The ACLU in your particular state would throw it's weight behind your case.

2) School vouchers: Your school implements school prayer, teaches creationism or similar activities then remove your child and send them to another school.

3) Moving: You are not tied to a specific place. If your school district does not suit your needs then pack up your things and leave.

As someone who wants to teach high school science I have to say that national education standards are something I can stand behind. There is an amount of knowledge children should leave school with and I would rather federal enforcement of those types of things rather than local. That being said perhaps there are reforms that could take place in terms of the things kids actually are taught.

In addition Fiery Penguin of Doom, your attitude seems not very well thought out. Not everyone can just pick up and move to another school district. This also presupposes that every parent's views on what their child is taught in accordance with what their children actually ought to learn. The parents and the local community can't be the only people who decide what the children should learn. As a nation we ought to have standards on what children should know that isn't subject to the silly opinions that are more prevalent and influential on a local level.
That being said, I'm as fallible as anyone else so please tell me why I'm mistaken.

There is some inaccuracy in the information you have presented. First, teachers are NOT the most significant factor in determining education outcomes for students. Socio-economic status is usually found to be about twice as important.

Second, the teachers' unions do not exist solely to try and extort money from the public. They also exist to protect teachers from frivolous charges(for example, fabricated sexual assault charges, which HAS happened), etc.

Plus, the simple economics of what you are proposing doesn't work. We already have shortages of competent math and science teachers(and many would say competent teachers overall). Taking away benefits and lowering pay is unlikely to improve this situation in any way. If anything, it would just push skilled individuals in those fields even further away from teaching. Nor is the punitive attitude and characterization by the media and the public of teachers as lazy, greedy, and incompetent making the field any more attracting. Any reform that focuses only on punishing incompetent teachers and does nothing to attract talent to the field will fail. If there were already legions of highly skilled teachers sitting at home waiting to be hired, schools would hire them. There aren't.

And merit pay, the supposed panacea-except no one can agree on a good way to measure merit. Value-added measurements are not reliable(which is unsurprising when you think back to the fact that teachers quality only accounts 15-25% of student learning outcomes anyway). Almost everyone WANTS to reward good teachers and encourage bad ones to do something else for a living, but we have not developed a way to systematically do this. It's not like we don't know locally who the good and bad teachers are(think of your own school), but we have not found a good way to systematically quantify it. If you have a good set of administrators in a school or district, I think merit pay by administrator reviews and rating would be more promising, but it depends on the quality of the administration in place.

On the other hand, Sweden, who we often look to because of their excellent education system, tends to pay teachers for being willing to take on extra responsibilities and for attained continuing education certificates/degrees. Plus, there is significant research showing merit pay doesn't actually improve schools, although this research is primarily with regard to value-added test-based merit pay.

Teachers deserve the utmost respect.

I didn't make such a claim. You're attempting to put words in my mouth.



The teacher's union protects bad teachers and ties the hands of administrators. The teachers themselves may be decent people but, the union officials are more concerned with padding their wallet than the education of children. There is a quote floating around of the (former?) head of the teacher's union publicly stating he didn't give two shits about the children and would only care about them when they were old enough to cast a Union vote.



Abolishing the Teachers unions would:

Remove the protections for bad teachers. Currently the union protects these teachers and shuffles them through the system to moderate the level of damage they do to children. As a aspiring teacher, you should be appalled that these people are protected.

Attract competent people to the field of teaching by eliminating the barriers to entry. Also by eliminating the Union, the money that goes towards the union bureaucrats will remain with the teachers, effectively raising their salary. I believe teacher's need a raise and I believe the unions are the problem because they block any and all reform. Like I already said, we spend more money per pupil than any other country IN THE WORLD. Money isn't the problem, it's the other factors including where the money is being spent and the students.





Merit pay should be determined on a case by case, teacher by teacher basis by the persons peers. I can remember a handful of teachers who I believe deserve a significant pay raise. While a few others deserve to be taken out back and shot to expunge them from the world.



I don't know why you harp on merit pay. I didn't even use nor imply merit pay in my post. I believe if you are a good teacher who invests time and energy into your students then you should be rewarded. I can remember one teacher who I think should easily earn double the average salary simply because she invested everything into her students and did a damn fine job.

Yeah, i agree. The best thing for them, aside from protesting is to give them respect.