<p>Average SAT score for college majors:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.joshuakennon.com/sat-scores-ranked-by-intended-college-major-show-teachers-are-below-average/[/url]”>http://www.joshuakennon.com/sat-scores-ranked-by-intended-college-major-show-teachers-are-below-average/</a></p>
<p>Those salaries are for 9 months of employment, right? </p>
<p>CA’s average from the tables puts teachers in the top 25% of US income earners for 9 months of work, but I don’t know if that would be considered good or bad in context. </p>
<p>It’s bad because the kids don’t learn.</p>
<p>If I pay $50 for someone to fix my car but the car still has problem then it’s not good.
If I pay $80 for another to fix it and the problem is gone then I am happier.</p>
<p>But teachers are not the only people totally responsible for the failure.</p>
<p><<<<
I was really surprised by this ruling and that it happened in California. The legal idea that tenure results in poor performers being dumped into poor schools which disproportionately hurts the poor is very interesting.
<<<</p>
<p>In Calif (and maybe elsewhere), it was called, “dance of the lemons”…moving crappy teachers to schools where parents are less vocal (often low-income schools and/or where many parents dont speak English).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How well does more education for teachers do this? Seems like it’s an issue of motivation and intelligence, not the amount of education they recieve. If they don’t care nothing else matters. If they’re too dumb nothing else matters. If they’re smart enough and motivated enough, they’ll find a way to be at least decent teachers. It seems like the best more education for educators will do is take the ones who are good, and make them slightly better. Doesn’t do anything to stop bad teachers from getting into the system. </p>
<p>When there is no downside to slacking off, people will slack off. That’s just human nature. How many people go above and beyond in a class that is an easy A? Not many.</p>
<p>Part of the problem, and what makes it more difficult to address, is how fractured the school system is. Here in PA, we have 501 school districts, so each has its own procedures, its own (if any) training and mentoring for new hires and its own set of administrators, who are answerable to 501 different school boards. </p>
<p>Earning tenure (3 year of teaching required in PA) should actually be the way to determine if a new hire has what it takes, in knowledge and pedological skill set, to teach. But I have yet to hear of a district who trains or employs an expert to make that determination. That seems a near-term, achievable goal.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The median income in the US is what, $55k?</p>
<p>LA Unified starts teachers – with nothing more than a liberal arts degree – at $45k+perqs. At what % of the national average should teachers start? 100%? 125% 150%? (At what point does their comp – including pensions – exceed the ability of the hoi polloi tax payers to pay them?)</p>
<p>And, let’s not forget retirement. Most of our school district and other public employee budgets are being squeezed right now by the funding of retirees not new hires. </p>
<p>“The median income in the US is what, $55k?”</p>
<p>I’d look at the median income for college graduates, not for the population. I don’t know what proportion of teachers nationally also have master’s degrees; where I live, it’s very high.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My district starts at around $40,000, with no distinction between teaching assignments.</p>
<p>Don’t want to get into a salary argument - everybody thinks they make too little and everybody else makes too much. But about the 9 month comment: My contracted work year is 195 days, with 2 paid personal days/year. If I could get hired for my 8 summer weeks with a commensurate salary, I would buy that argument. But even though I’m not required to work, the schedule keeps me from being employed at a comparable rate for that period. (The closest I have come is 6 weeks of summer school for 12 hours/week at my contract hourly rate.) We have a mandatory 7.5% contribution rate for retirement and we also contribute to healthcare, right now at about 3% (for a $1,000 deductible plan; there are other choices).</p>
<p>When I became a mom, 20 years ago, I went back to school for a Masters in Education and took a $12,000 pay cut to become a teacher. (I was a project manager for a software company and traveled constantly - I still miss my expense account!)</p>
<p>I have no real regrets, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, either.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Though I agree that comparing to the median income doesn’t make sense (and comparing to the median household income makes even less sense), but the whole point of this argument was that teachers aren’t “as good” as other college graduates, because the standards are so low. So comparing them to college graduates as a whole doesn’t sound right either. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Excuse me? I thought we were discussing how to attract better teachers and raise the quality of teachers’ ability to teach, and I’m happy to engage in that conversation. Considering an entire group of professionals as somehow “less than” does not progress that discussion. </p>
<p>Or is it only for teachers that where you go to undergrad and what your SAT scores are determines your worth?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I was taking the attitude of this topic from a number of posts, though this one strongest, and no one seemed to disagree, some even specifically agreed:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If I misunderstood the attitude of the topic, forgive me. What is the attitude on the relative “goodness” of teachers relative to the general population/general college-degreed population here? This isn’t something I’m looking to take a position on here, so I’d rather just go along with what everyone else thinks in this topic. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Non teaching jobs also have a contribution to Social Security at around 6.2%. I would rather have my retirement money almost anywhere except for SS.
The health care benefits at 3% for a $1k plan sounds like an unbelievably great deal.</p>
<p>In NJ teachers contribute to both the pension at 7.5% and to social security. It is not one it is both. They also pay up to 30% of the health care premium. The average teacher makes $65,000.</p>
<p>Yes I know many make more</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In our NYS district, bonuses alone can add up to a quarter of a million dollars over the span of a teacher’s career. They get full medical (for life), and yearly step increases of 5-18% on top of a 2-2.5% salary increase. Many are earning in the high 5 or low 6 figures (paid for by local taxpayers), yet the median income in our community is under 50 grand. The prices we’re paying aren’t affordable. Over the last 5 years, our state union has lost 35,000 jobs, so it’s not turning out that well for our personnel either. I’m all for unions, but at what cost? Last year, a local district couldn’t afford to provide mandated math classes for all the kids who needed extra help. Lab time for another school’s science was held after school hours because they couldn’t afford enough teachers to fit it in during regular school day. Prices are rising so fast we can’t keep up; every public school district in NYS is expected to become insolvent in the next 3-5 years. Are there some great teachers? Yes. Do they deserve a 12% step increase, plus a 2.5% salary increase, on top of a $9k bonus, and free medical? Maybe. Can we afford it? No.</p>
<p>This is one of those cases where it is a complex problem where people love to find simple answers. The idea of tenure as I understand it was to allow a school to grant its top performers basically a job where they didn’t have to worry about being fired or would be at the very least in the case of layoffs be up on the list to stay, and it also prevented schools from doing what others said, firing experienced teachers to save money. Part of the problem with the tenure process is in how it was granted, often if the studies I read were true, a lot of the times they were given out as patronage plumbs by the administrators, and often the friends and cronies are granted it…</p>
<p>And yes, it has been used to protect bad teachers, especially in urban districts, staggeringly bad teachers, ones who could barely put a sentence together, whose kids did poorly and when they checked them out, were found to be basically incompetent. The problem is with tenure ‘due process’ is so byzantine, so costly, that schools basically don’t even bother to try. NYC has infamous ‘rubber rooms’ full of teachers no one wants, who basically sit there collecting paychecks even though none of the schools wants them. So there are real issues.</p>
<p>My big concern would be exactly as others talk about, and that is without tenure, like with so many things out there, we will have get rid of experienced teachers, no matter how good, to cut costs. You can pooh pooh this, but as much as people whine about schools and their quality, how many people bother to vote in school elections? How many people would bother if they let’s say hypothetically got rid of their experienced teachers, and hired newly minted kids out of jerkwater schools or more likely, tried bringing in foreign teachers on visas at reduced rates (and yes, folks, this has happened), to scream bloody murder…or would they be happy when the administrators tell them there is no need to raise property taxes to pay for increased school costs? Wanna bet which one it is?</p>
<p>I am not necessarily a big fan of many teachers or the teacher’s unions, for a lot of reasons, they often are part of the problem but not part of the solution, but I also think this notion that the problem is all bad teachers or lazy teachers and so forth is a stereotype, not reality, and it also leaves off the hook the political crap that often ruins schools, and also is a magic bullet that since we can fire teachers, we will therefore get rid of the ‘crap’ and hire the ‘gems’…among other things, it leaves out that quite frankly, teaching is often seen rather than as a worthwhile, challenging career as being a place you go if you can’t do anything else (and before any teachers on here give me a hard time, I am talking perceptions). How many of the parents or kids over on the ivy college board or the ones talking about admissions to competitive schools talk about wanting to teach? Very few, most of them talk about tech careers or investment banking or finance or business, and that is part of the problem, if these kids are the best and brightest, how come teaching is rarely at the top of their agenda? One of the reasons I think it is hard to get good teachers is as a society, we don’t emphasize it, and yes, all these negative perceptions of it almost being a blue collar job, being kind of like the perceptions of union labor at a manufacturing plant, lazy, etc, so who would want to do that? I think, too, kids see what teachers face, with all the teaching to the test, all the crap with common core and the like, and even if they want to teach, wonder what it will be like, will they be teaching or spoon feeding crap to kids to do well on a test? We need to encourage the bright kids, the ones who really care about it, to go into it , to supplement the ones already there, and have to figure out how to reward them. </p>
<p>Want proof? In the 1930’s and 1940’s NYC had the best public school systems in the world, literally, Malcolm Gladwell talks about it in “Outliers”…the reason? People who otherwise would have taught in college, who had PHd’s and the like in subjects like math and science and English, went into the public schools because there were jobs there during the depression and WWII, and it showed in the results (my mom went to the same high school Colin Powell did, in the South Bronx, she graduated in the early 40s…the math department had 75% of its members with PHd’s…and that was common.) People talk about all the poor kids who went to school in this period in NYC and made something of themselves (and hold that up against poor, inner city schools today as proof there is ‘something wrong with the kids’), when the fact is the teachers back then by a large margin were better qualified than the ones teaching today in those same schools. </p>
<p>Then, too, we also have to know how to evaluate teachers. Put it this way, getting great results out of kids in places like scarsdale, NY or Bernadsville, NJ is a lot easier than doing it in the South Bronx or South Central. It is a lot easier to produce kids with 2400 SAT’s, 4.0 GPA’s and 8 AP classes out of the well off families who make up the former, teachers have a lot less to do than in the latter, because the kids in the former have access to a world of things, the latter don’t. So how do you evaluate a teacher in the South Bronx, facing challenges teachers in other places only face in nightmares? Do we look at standardized test scores, like the SAT, when the well off kids have a huge advantage with that? What do we look at…are you going to compare a kid whose father is a corporate lawyer and whose mom has an MBA to a kid whose family immigrated here with nothing? How do we measure that, and who does it? So far, I see standards that assume all ids have the same opportunity. </p>
<p>I would be willing to bet that with this decision, what you will see isn’t the incompetent and the lazy and such getting the axe, but rather teachers getting fired who make too much, this is the mentality of business and with all this talk of running schools like a business, you will see this. Administrators who produce cheaper costs will be rewarded, and if the schools do badly, it will be because of ‘lazy teachers’ or ‘parents who indulge their kids’, I would bet on it. The irony shouldn’t be lost, one of the reason inner city schools have so much problems is that for the most part, they are overwhelmingly staffed by inexperienced teachers, experienced teachers don’t want to go there, and the turnover rate is so high that they can’t keep people long enough to get experienced. Pull tenure, and I think you will start seeing this in other districts, not because teachers leave, but because they make up some excuse, fire the teacher, and hire someone costing a lot less, it is just too tempting to those who see schools as nothing but an expense, the three R’s idiots, and the like, for it not to be a reality. About the only way this will be checked is if the quality of the schools declines and it affects the value of people’s homes, then you will see an outcry. </p>
<p>When I hear statements like “now we can get rid of all the dead wood and make the schools better”, I cringe, because as Mencken once said, “for every problem, there is a solution, simple, straightforward…and dead wrong”. This kind of thing has been the rallying cry of the talk radio crowd for years, but what they leave out is places that don’t have teacher tenure are struggling with the same problems as the big, bad old schools with the big,. bad old, strong teacher’s unions…and often those schools struggle, because, guess why? They pay crap and can’t attract experienced, good teachers. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There is little/no evidence that holding a Masters degree makes one a better teacher. Thus, it should not be paid for from a compensation standpoint. (yes, I know that districts give automatic pay raises for a masters, but that doesn’t make economic sense.)</p>
<p>But back to tenure: my guess is that the Judge’s ruling gets over-turned on appeal.</p>
<p>blue- some districts want their teachers to have master degrees. In some communities it is important and they are willing to pay to get that result.</p>
<p>I read that teachers spend 1.3 billion a year of their own money to purchase supplies for their students and classroom. Is that a common practice in most industries?</p>