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Don't forget also that most teachers do not work the full year. They get summer off just like students. So comparing an annual teacher's salary to an annual non-teaching salary is not entirely accurate, since teachers generally only work 3/4 of the time normal employees would work.
> Zarf BeebleBrix wrote:
> Don't forget also that most teachers do not work the full year. They get summer off just like students. So comparing an annual teacher's salary to an annual non-teaching salary is not entirely accurate, since teachers generally only work 3/4 of the time normal employees would work.
I think mandatory, lengthy unpaid overtime definitely makes up for that.
mandrewsf,
"Short hours? No."
While good teachers do spend significantly more time with their work, the fact is that the required time is not huge. Their average is brought down a bit by their lack of holidays, weekends, and _entire summers off_. Are you bad at math? You might want to avoid mathematical arguments in the future. Their required hours are significantly shorter than that of any other profession w/a 40 hour work week, because very few others professions get anywhere near their huge number of vacations. Even better teachers averaging an extra hour/day to grade work still have short hours.
"No competition? No."
Not in the public sector. Teachers unions take good care of their members.
"BA teachers are now rare (about a third of the teachers at my old high school had doctorates)"
For your information, this is not usually the case. It does explain your being out of touch with reality, though.
"17 years of work for $80k is unimpressive;"
With a BA? Should everyone make 90k with a BA? It's impossible to argue that they should without violating the laws of physics. If everyone with a BA was making 90k we'd have to print a lot of money and we'd all be broke.
"someone with a master-level professional degree can make easily twice that amount, if not more"
160k easily with a masters? Have you done it? Now you're just making things up.
"if he is as hard-working as a teacher"
As hard working as a teacher? Tell us, how hard do teachers work compared to other professions? How do they rate compared to coal miners, power plant technicians, secretaries, doctors, etc? Now you're just making up nonsense, as if you can rate how hard teachers work compared to others.
"In any case, teachers' pay seldom exceed the average income of the private-sector workers in their school district, since the education budget (and teachers' pay) comes from local taxes (usually property) and is voted on by the local population, the vast majority of whom are not government employees."
Could you please cite a source for this statistic? Additionally, shouldn't you compare their average compensation, not just income, on account of the fact that their pensions tend to pwn the crap out of (to use a technical phrase) those in private sector?
You don't seem aware that teachers unions' typically contribute a lot of funding to local politics, such as school board elections. They fund the campaigns of those who then negotiate with their unions. Sometimes they get a lot of ringers in there. Sometimes (in some areas) they don't; but those cases aren't what we're talking about here.
"And fundamentally, to think that we should reduce incentives for a job that is already having a hard time attracting talent and cut funding on education"
How can you propose that the primary motivator for teachers to take up the profession is money, when it's not a high-earning profession? Have a look at a few graphs (w/citations):
http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.html
And try to make the argument that funding is a problem. Funding has skyrocketed while scores have typically stayed the same or even fallen. If you want to talk about hurting the vast majority of the population, maybe you should consider that you're blaming funding while it's clearly not the problem. You're ignoring the problem(s).
"I think mandatory, lengthy unpaid overtime definitely makes up for that."
Says who? Additional requirements differ from area to area. That 3/4 your teachers had PhDs explains why you have no idea what the average time spent is. If you think that the average teacher spends 2+ hours on their work after hours daily, I think you're a drug user or psychotic.
The point is that _some_ teachers are making (including benefits/pensions) far, far, far, far more than their private sector counterparts. That you think $90,000 a year for a bachelors education (+benefits/epic pension [or two]) is normal/acceptable pretty much concedes this point. And again, the example I referenced was from the late '90s. Those salaries are surely higher than 80/90k now (which is still above average, as are their benefits/pensions).
The point is that this is an example of unjust and unsustainable government spending, made possible in large part because of government-worker unions in collusion with elected officials. They each fund each other with taxpayer dollars. We're getting screwed. That this doesn't happen in some areas is great. And irrelevant, because we're not talking about those areas.
Altruist
"I think Justinian's suggestions in his 1st posts would give a true hard core bolshevik communist movement a real chance, even in the US. The Bolsheviki thought it necessary and helpful to worsen the situation to make everybody see the need for revolution. Well, they weren't nice people and certainly did not shy away from some mass-suffering."
That's what Amerika's current leaders are doing. Many of Justinian I's suggestions (I'm leaving some of them alone!) would help the situation, not worsen it. This is why both Republicans and Democrats (aka progressives, both parties) have been fighting to break the US for decades. Nobody with a brain thinks we hit $15.5 trillion in debt by being responsible. The explicit goal is a collapse. The catalyst is power hungry leaders and a lazy people who keep voting for handouts, oblivious to the obvious unsustainability of the beast.
"In that brutal way there seems to be quite a common ground for bolshevik communists and capitalistic exploiters."
Capitalist "exploiters" can be prevented with simple laws and effective law enforcement (what a dream, I know). I think Justinian I is arguing more for unchaining capitalism's best attributes for the greater good of all (against Bolshevism), less for not regulating it with legitimate (not corrupt) laws. I see your point, I'm just saying that I think his aim was more to combat Bolshevism than to aid it. That matter comes down to the effects of his proposals. I don't think most of them are very catastrophic; I think, on the whole, they'd tend to be more beneficial than crazy.
It's ironic that you are asking me for citations when you don't provide any yourself for most of your arguments. But here goes.
"While good teachers do spend significantly more time with their work, the fact is that the required time is not huge. Their average is brought down a bit by their lack of holidays, weekends, and _entire summers off_. Are you bad at math? You might want to avoid mathematical arguments in the future. Their required hours are significantly shorter than that of any other profession w/a 40 hour work week, because very few others professions get anywhere near their huge number of vacations. Even better teachers averaging an extra hour/day to grade work still have short hours."
Oh really? Can *you* quantify the number of work hours of an average teacher compared to a normal, 40 hour workweek? Have you ever even had the chance to talk to a teacher about the nitbits of their career? It really doesn't have that much to do with math. Please cut your personal attacks; resorting to them to support unrelated arguments is pretty pathetic.
"For your information, this [average teacher's education level] is not usually the case. It does explain your being out of touch with reality, though."
I went to a public school, and an average one at that. You are clearly the one who's out of touch with reality if you don't even know that the average half-decent teacher in a high school is usually a double major in both education and the subject they teach, and very often (usually a majority) have a master-level degree.
"someone with a master-level professional degree can make easily twice that amount, if not more"
Lemme make an easy example--an engineer with 17 years of experience. Why don't you find an engineer with that much work experience who's willing to work for less than 6 figures? Also note that according to your example, teacher's salary is capped at 80k, while private sector employees have no pay caps. The private sector
Tell me mr. Knowledge.
How much is the average cost per student? Average class size?
And what is the average pay of a full time teacher versus a part time teacher since you clearly added them together...
I await the answer.
Oh, hi troll. Sorry, I'm not into really dumb troll bait, so pardon me if I'm brief. You're making completely ridiculous claims about teacher hours and educations. Comparing them to engineers, one of (if not the) highest paid groups of professions? Yeah, that's legit.
I asked for one citation when you referenced teacher salaries. I additionally remarked that it's their benefits which tend to be really out of hand--so shouldn't we be looking at total salary+benefits--but you just ignored this legitimate question.
You pretend to be unable to read. When I said that I was referring to a figure from more than a decade ago (which has surely risen), this escaped you. When I said repeatedly that this was figure for one area and that the problem is NOT in all areas, this escaped you. When you said "more than 80k" was normal and I subsequently referenced "90k," this escaped you.
You're just insulting everybody's intelligence with this drivel. You want a citation for the fact that 35 hour work weeks with weekends, holidays, and summers off is less hours than a 40-50 hr work week? While many teachers put in significantly more time than this, many do not. Planning/grading time is built into their schedules in that 35 hour week. Many design/grade tests in that time. With computer scanning sheets, the 3 minutes it takes them to grade exams just isn't that taxing. I was overly generous in my generalizations before. Some work far less hours than I suggested.
You go on to post national averages, as if they mean _anything_. I've already addressed the fact that some teachers aren't overpaid and are underpaid. That they bring down the average doesn't change the fact that we're talking about grossly overpayed teachers, not all teachers on average. Good job missing the point/argument entirely and responding to a red herring!
Mand,
I am calling bs. Never in my experience have teachers in primary/secondary schooling held Ph.Ds. Seriously, wtf?
Altruist,
Actually, it would improve conditions, not worsen them. And there would be no military shootings on strikers. Striking would be legal, but the company ofc would be allowed to hire new employees.
The point is that many government employees, in large part thanks to government-worker union/elected official collusion, receive much larger salary/benefit/pension packages than their private sector counterparts. The costs of these often-ridiculous payments are a massive burden on the Amerikan economy. That a troll pointed out that not all teachers (a small subset of all unionized government workers) are guilty of this is irrelevant. My apologies for taking so much time and space to pummel a troll's spam into the ground.
This might be interestnig:
"A larger percentage of full-time teachers held a postbaccalaureate degree (master's degree, education specialist or professional diploma, first-professional degree, or doctoral degree) in 2007
"Let me tell you what the real problem is: too many people in this country want to imagine that certain problems don't exist because they contradict their well-wrought dogmas."
This is too true, on the right and the left. Union leaders are just as guilty of this tendency as anyone else, and I would attribute the diminished prominence over the last few decades as a direct result of this tendency. There is also an argument to be made for their anti-trust activities. The effect unions are having on society is not conducive to the values they are supposed to represent. They are stuck in a political and bureaucratic quagmire that they won't escape from without significant innovation.
Abolishing unions is far from the most ideal solution. The values they are supposed to uphold and the effect they are supposed to have on society are positive. In fact, without strong, influential unions, society would otherwise be very worse off. The task at hand is for unions to become more prominent, but in ways that positively effect society according to the values they have historically purported to hold dear.
people have very diffrent views of teachers. if you teach 6 classes with about 30 students each = 180 students. every student is diffrent, some are smart, some dumb, peaceful, violent...; their living conditions maybe good or bad... as a teacher you have to support every student in his/her learning and teachers suffer with their students if the support doesn't help. teaching for 18-21 hours a week means preparations of 2-3x the time. 60 hours per week are normal for a teacher. most are not even paid for. ever saw these funny videos on youtube about teachers in bad situations? this is a reallity that nobody wants to see. teachers turned into clowns in a moment of bad luck. Is it worth the pay to end in the web for all time as a clown and everybody laughs at you? Some teachers get attacked after school, because lazy students with bad grades demand for better.
Where do you get off saying preparation time for teaching is 2-3x times the actual teaching time? For the most part it is simply a record on repeat when it comes to teaching. It is not like they have to re-invent their classes each time they want to give them. They make whatever changes need to be done at the start of the school year and start saying the same basic things they have said throughout their entire career on the subject they are teaching.
They are not "creating" something when they prepare to teach a class. The are merely giving information they have learned from someone else.
So lets not get carried away here...
i can maybe believe above 40 hours a week for teachers teaching their first year of classes when making up lesson plans etc. however, after that first year i sincerely doubt they spend much more time than 40 hours a week for grades k-12 unless you can tell me how often math theorems or grammatical etc rules change. teacher unions are among the strongest unions in the country. for part-time half year workers they make more than enough money and benefits than they deserve for their BA or BS degrees which any idiot who drinks 100 beers a week in college can graduate with. they also have tenure which means they can stop working altogether after that is granted with the exception of possibly getting fired for rape charges.
the only k-12 teachers i think are underpaid are the inner city teachers who actually have to deal with gun violence and severely underprivileged or challenged kids. look up the difference between what they are paid for the crap they have to deal with and the suburban teachers in well off areas like middletown, nj who i am referring to in the above paragraph. it's a shame.
as for the part about phd teachers, those teachers are usually reimbursed for continuing education and they make a higher salary for the advanced degree. there are not many public k-12 teachers (relatively) with advanced degrees.
Edit: hydrop beat me by about a minute on the repeat lesson plan argument
@V.Kemp
U mad? Because it seems that clear, cogent arguments are too much for your impotent intellectual capacity and you must resort to tantrums to get your way. Let me sum up everything you've said in one sentence: I'm a troll, and by extension all of my arguments are wrong. Sorry, but you have to do better than that.
And anyone who's ever received a decent education (and this clearly excludes you) would understand that it is hard to be a teacher. I've been a TA in both high school and college and I know first-hand how much time and effort it requires to be a good teacher, and how little compensation they receive in return. There's only one explanation why you think teaching is a joke, 35-hour per week job that receive boons in both pay and benefits: you are probably some lazy-ass thirty-some years old ne
@ mandrewsf
are you talking about college or k-12?
what i said was indeed a very general statement which i only met to apply to suburban public k-12 grade teachers who have tenure. it was also only based on my own experience. for instance, there was a 6th grade history teacher who would write notes on the board at the beginning of the day and have the students copy them when they got to class and they could sit quietly or work on other stuff for the rest of the class. there was little to no instruction. of course, there are good and bad teachers just like there are good and bad employees in every field but my own experiences have led me to believe that tenure and teacher unions for public school k-12 teachers are dangerous things for our youth.
to contrast, we had a christian private high school where tuition was about 6k a year (this is 12 years or so ago) and the teachers were mostly brothers who made nothing near public teachers nor did they get the same benefits. their students typically went on to much better schools than the students from my public high school. the wealth of the respective students did not vary a great deal because the town i lived in was a very affluent area. thus, my own personal observations have led me to believe that tenure and strong unions for public school k-12 teachers tend to encourage laziness
also, i'm probably biased because our teacher union went on strike every year and had to be imprisoned one year for violating a court order to return to work. their repetitive greed (except for the teachers who got so sick of the union that they just left for another district) has probably influenced me a great deal on this issue haha
and yes i'm too lazy to edit this post for spelling or grammatical errors
dont put it down to laziness
as a legal professional your time is worth money
you get paid to type good
nobody here is paying
so skru dem
ha ha very true chris.
Mandrewsf I don't think that this is the right audience to present your argument in 
. I'm certain you'll have a much more fruitful and intellectual discussion with other people that do not hold certain dogmas and prejudices in their thought.
"The point is that many government employees, in large part thanks to government-worker union/elected official collusion, receive much larger salary/benefit/pension packages than their private sector counterparts. The costs of these often-ridiculous payments are a massive burden on the Amerikan economy. That a troll pointed out that not all teachers (a small subset of all unionized government workers) are guilty of this is irrelevant. My apologies for taking so much time and space to pummel a troll's spam into the ground."
Clearly, your ad hominem attack in calling mandrewsf a 'troll' is a legitimate way to disprove his argument.
"Mand,
I am calling bs. Never in my experience have teachers in primary/secondary schooling held Ph.Ds. Seriously, wtf?"
Here is another fallacy. Just because in your experience, you have never had a teacher with a Ph.D., does that mean that all secondary school teachers do not have a Ph.D.? It is easy to see how your way of reasoning can lead to faulty conclusions. For example, I have never seen or had an experience of being on Mars. Thus, Mars is BS. Amirite? Sounds like BS to me 
> Purin wrote:
> "Mand,
I am calling bs. Never in my experience have teachers in primary/secondary schooling held Ph.Ds. Seriously, wtf?"
Here is another fallacy. Just because in your experience, you have never had a teacher with a Ph.D., does that mean that all secondary school teachers do not have a Ph.D.? It is easy to see how your way of reasoning can lead to faulty conclusions. For example, I have never seen or had an experience of being on Mars. Thus, Mars does not exist. Amirite?
http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28
Demographic Characteristics
In 2007
"In 2007
but you won't know from that which were high school and which were primary school teachers.
Discretionary Mandatory
Requested[41] Enacted[40] Requested[41] Enacted[40]
Department of Defense including Overseas Contingency Operations $701.6 billion $683.0 billion $5.8 billion $5.3 billion
Department of Health and Human Services including Medicare and Medicaid $88.6 billion $84.2 billion $804.2 billion $787.8 billion
Department of Education $78.9 billion $79.1 billion $
Zarf,
You're confusing inductive reasoning for deductive reasoning . It's not the best inductive reasoning either, but it's perfectly reasonable, especially when you consider a Ph.Ds opportunity costs. Ph.Ds have other options, and it's unlikely a k-12 school can afford them. If a Ph.D chooses to work at a k-12 school, then I have no sympathy for them if they are underpaid. Fact is they can work somewhere else for a lot more, and if they are working at a school then they can accept the "nobility" of their actions as compensation.
Purin,
I don't disagree with you on military spending. I want EVERYTHING cut so that taxes can be reduced to 10% and I have economic freedom. I recognize this will come at a sacrifice to public services and am willing to pay that price, understand?
> Justinian I wrote:
> Zarf,
You're confusing inductive reasoning for deductive reasoning . It's not the best inductive reasoning either, but it's perfectly reasonable, especially when you consider a Ph.Ds opportunity costs. Ph.Ds have other options, and it's unlikely a k-12 school can afford them. If a Ph.D chooses to work at a k-12 school, then I have no sympathy for them if they are underpaid. Fact is they can work somewhere else for a lot more, and if they are working at a school then they can accept the "nobility" of their actions as compensation.
I was actually arguing this exact same thing in chat, saying exactly what you said. 
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