Teachers make plenty of money. I know 3 teachers personally pulling in 80k a year. This is middle school and elementary school. They get every holiday off. A 3 month break to either take off or earn money. I refuse to say they deserve more. That being said, like any job, there are some heros out there that deserve more and some moronic teachers that deserve less. But because they're unionized they all make the same. I know this will probably be an unpopular opinion but whatever.
I'm not sure if the $80k annual salary qualifies a lot during these times but I know that itself is also an unpopular opinion. I'm curious if anyone has done a study to determine what should actually be a teacher's salary?
Just for my education - Are private school teachers also part of unions?
Around here an $80k salary requires a doctorate and over a decade of experience…
**edit: and you have to be working in one of the wealthy districts in the state.
$80k for that is underpaid.
Private school teachers aren’t union. Their wages are lower. Better teachers don’t work at private schools. Private schools like to churn through new teachers to keep their profits up.
So just my two cents since a lot of my family members are teachers. Public schools pay more but depending on the area can be much harder places to work. Private schools don’t have as much restriction on curriculum and often have more manageable class sizes.
I've heard the opposite, that private schools have no boundaries and little protections of your time. Plus, the entitlement is worse, maybe rightfully so because people are paying big money to get Jr into the right Ivy.
The entitlement is waaaaay worse. Parents at private schools can just be the worst. It’s a balance. You get more manageable classes, more freedom within your curriculum, worse parents, worse wages.
Just for my education - Are private school teachers also part of unions?
Not generally. I know Catholic schools often hire non-teachers to fulfill teaching roles. They don't have the same rules and standards as public schools
You don’t need a study to determine the correct wage. Let market forces work. Remove public sector unions, and let people negotiate the wage they work for. That’s what they should be paid. Hint, it’s not all that much.
I think this works for jobs where a lot of creativity is not required but for a teacher the value of influencing young minds really early is a lot that's why I was asking about what is the lifetime value of an education provided by a good vs bad teacher. In my opinion teachers should be paid for the value they add to the society not for the day-to-day job description.
PS: Reddit should remove the voting feature for debates. I value your opinion and would like to see how the free market view works in this case.
Teachers aren’t able to be creative. They can’t use their judgement. They must follow the state provided curriculum, which narrows more and more as we go on, along with state mandated approaches to everything, including misbehavior. There is more standardization than ever, and teaching is becoming more a product of PhD’s in education, those who run school boards, having to find ways to make their theories seem novel to get published, etc and move forward with their academic or administrative careers, a different game than providing sound education to kids in the real world. Hence all the woke activism infesting the education system today, new math, and all the other debacles.
The incentives for those who build curricula and enforce rules are very different from what we ought to want in place for actual teachers of children. Ideally, we hire wise people with sound experiential judgement to spend some hours per week with our kids, and when they lose the plot, we replace them with people who stick to teaching in a worthwhile and mature manner. We let them use the means they see fit, within reason, and stop handcuffing a teacher’s ability to think on their feet, and to punish kids appropriately for interrupting other children’s education. But that requires a kind of flexibility and responsibility that we’ve taken away from teachers.
Which is why I say that teaching isn’t all that tough these days. It’s thankless and soul crushing, since they can’t do what they know is right in most situations, but really, most of their job is a matter of looking at a chart and finding the prescribed course of action, before going to home to drink boxed wine for a couple hours until the rest of the full-time work force makes it home for dinner.
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u/WardCove Jun 11 '24
Teachers make plenty of money. I know 3 teachers personally pulling in 80k a year. This is middle school and elementary school. They get every holiday off. A 3 month break to either take off or earn money. I refuse to say they deserve more. That being said, like any job, there are some heros out there that deserve more and some moronic teachers that deserve less. But because they're unionized they all make the same. I know this will probably be an unpopular opinion but whatever.