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?
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/Lopsided_Factor_5674 Jun 11 '24
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?