It is not that helpful to compare Finnish teacher salaries to American teacher salaries in absolute terms for two reasons:
The cost of living is different, so the same money in absolute terms buys a different amount of goods and services;
The job markets are different. To attract talented people to teaching, you have to pay a salary that is competitive with the salary offered by other types of jobs these people could reasonably be expected to be qualified for and to desire.
Similarly, $50k might barely be a living wage for a single person in NYC, but it is not nearly enough to raise a family in NYC, and certainly is peanuts given the job market: most people from top-tier schools can go to Wall Street or similar and make 2 or 3 times as much (considering also the bonus) right off the bat.
Another important factor is the extreme difficulty of teaching in some public schools, such as inner city schools. 50k or even 75k could well look like far too little for this daunting task when other options are available. I remember well the story told me by my father, who was a NYC public school teacher for 38 years and responsible for hiring math teachers for the school. He could not find any teachers with math licenses, so he hired a woman as a substitute and tutored her for months until she passed the licensing exam. She taught in the school for 1 year. Then she quit teaching to take a job answering heat complaints for the City of New York. She told my father answering heat complaints was easier and paid about the same.
It’s a small detail, but I doubt even a HYPMS degree guarantees you a job on wall street, especially at 125k to start. On the larger issue, you’ve certainly bought into the TFA foundational myth, that an Ivy league degree somehow imparts unique teaching ability.
ROTFLOL!! Not really, especially if they knew what teaching…especially in challenging environments involves…even at $80k which isn’t the starting salary in your district…but the average.
Taking the case of a friend who graduated below a 3.0 cumulative GPA in CS in the mid-'00s.
Despite that lowish GPA, his FIRST job out of college started at $80k…in mid-'00s dollars. And that was below the norm as many CS majors I knew from the same period with equivalent programming skillsets were getting higher starting salaries straight out of undergrad.
Let’s count the factors giving advantage to CS/tech vs STEM teaching:
Starting salary - Overwhelming advantage definitely goes to CS/tech. Moreso when one considers teachers…especially those in challenging school environments often have to pay for classroom/student school supplies out of their own pocket.
Working hours - If one factors hours outside of school to grade papers, callup/listen to concerns/criticisms from parents, chaparone extracurricular events like proms, etc…a wash. Even with summers…much of that seems to be taken for developmental meetings/further education to maintain/increase credentials to remain in position/promotion prospects.
In short…a wash.
Aggravation/stress factor - I don’t know…but to my friend and myself…having to handle K-12 classroom discipline issues, unreasonable/angry parents who feel their child is blameless and it’s all your fault even when there’s manifest evidence it was the child’s fault, dealing with unresponsive/unreasonable educrats/politicians who expect teachers to solve all the students’/school districts’ woes without giving them adequate funding/support/tools to do so or realizing some of those expectations may be beyond the scope of those of most teachers/school systems, etc means it’s far more of an ordeal than to work some overtime completing a programming/tech project. At least there’s far less sources of aggravation in the CS/tech world…boss/supervisor, higher execs, and/or clients.
Advantage CS/tech
Perceived prestige/respectability assigned to profession in US society:
With a few exceptions, it’s the CS/tech worker who is perceived as being in a more prestigious/respectable profession in many corners of US society.
Especially considering I’ve personally witnessed/heard many upper/upper-middle class parents…both as a student* and later on as a working professional openly express disdain about the teaching profession and the academic/intellectual gravitas of most teachers.
And unfortunately, there’s a grain of truth to it as I personally know of several cases of college classmates/friends who were admitted to top 3 M.Ed programs with undergrad GPAs and GRE scores which would have precluded them from being considered for admission to any other graduate division of the same elite campus or even entry-level jobs which mandate a minimum of a cumulative 3.0 GPA to be considered. I know for certain two** received a 50% or greater scholarship/fellowship to attend…and neither are URMs and one came from a well-to-do background.
I also personally tutored an ex-GF of the CS major friend I mentioned above who was an elementary ed major at a public university because she was on her way to failing HS level algebra for the third time. Yes, her ed school allowed her to take HS level algebra to fulfill her quant requirements. Still boggles my mind that this ed school allowed for the use of a HS math course(talking 8th/9th grade level basic algebra) to fulfill their quant requirement.
Having said that, it prompts a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” questions regarding its cause/effect. Was it the declining prestige/respectability of the teaching profession which caused the profession to not attract enough highly qualified applicants or the lack of a critical mass of qualified applicants willing to go into the teaching profession which caused this issue?
While volunteering as a translator at parent-teacher meetings in junior high and HS.
** One of them was a post-college roommate and friend I lived with for ~5 years.
I think if you want to be a teacher, be a teacher. Salaries for careers are all over the place and bright, smart, engaged kids do all sorts of things…they don’t just chase high paying jobs (well maybe some kids do, but it certainly would be a minority). Teachers are pretty fairly compensated these days compared to the early 80s if you think in terms of the “package” of insurance, salary, hours, etc. for a BA or MA. I’m not sure that teachers don’t have “prestige”…I’m not sure I know what “prestige” means when it comes to a career to be honest. I get successful careers, but outside of CEOs what does “prestige” look like? We don’t have a “national” system in the US so in my opinion it either lives with the individual states or we nationalize education so I pretty much don’t care who runs the Secretary of Education…I’m not sure what that department really does LOL other perhaps data gathering on what the states are doing. If they want to nationalize education then that is a horse of an entirely different color…do we nationalize K-12? or do we nationalize our public system through the state universities? An entirely different conversation.
See, this is part of the problem I mentioned upthread, where charter schools really are a different animal state to state.
Some states allow this. In other states (including my state, Alaska), it is emphatically not allowed—entry into charter schools is purely by lottery, with the only thumb on the scale being for siblings of students currently enrolled at the school.
Just another plea to be very, very careful when extrapolating from your own jurisdiction’s rules to educational policy more broadly—and that goes not just for charter schools, but all types of schools.
But even if entry is by lottery, the parents have to choose to enroll their kids in charters, so that eliminates kids from teh pool if they don’t have tied in, informed parents who place a high value on education. It is also well documented that many charters “counsel out” students who have special needs or are high maintenance in other ways. Often they do this after October 1st so they keep the state money and send the high need kids back to the public schools, which have to take all comers. Looks like Eva Moskowitz’ charter chain is being accused of that right now: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/success-charter-network-accused-disability-violations-article-1.2503503
@Plotinus I am not sure that the salary one would need to raise a family in NYC is useful in addressing what might be appropriate compensation for teachers in general. NYC is an outlier in every respect. $50,000 will not go far in Manhattan as a single person and would not support a family there. If you are teaching in Manhattan you very likely are commuting from a more affordable area,
In digging a little deeper into teacher compensation I don’t think the picture is as gloomy as you paint it though. In the east coast school district where my children were raised, a high school teacher coming out of school with a B.A, would make a minimum salary of $45,248. That would increase over time and caps out at $91,000 after about 20 years with the school district. A teacher with an M.A. is offered a minimum of $55,500 and that caps out at about $105,000 after 20 years with the schools district.
For our specific geographic area those starting salaries would not be considered high, but certainly adequate for a young person starting out to support themselves in a reasonable manner. I agree that it becomes more complicated when you get into what is adequate to support a family and you look at the earnings trajectory. In our area the increases would not be adequate and would require a dual income for a family of 4 or 5 to live comfortably. But I don’t think that scenario is unique to teachers – dual income families seem to be more the norm than not.
And let’s not forget that teachers work about 9 1/2 months of the year with good benefits and more job security than one would find in most corporate jobs. Quality of life issues should be factored in as well – more reasonable hours and time off for holidays and summer. You are not going to get rich on a teacher’s salary but yet plenty of people still pursue the profession, so that is obviously not their goal. I am not sure that I agree that somehow means these people are less qualified.
Teacher salaries may be higher now than they were in the 80s, but I am not sure if that is the case when the salaries are adjusted for inflation. In any case, these salaries have not kept pace with the real cost of living (real estate, college tuition, health care, etc). Many people consider whether they can raise a family later down the line in their chosen profession. And those who don’t often are motivated or forced to change career later on. Just look at what happens to the Teach for America people. How many of these people remain in teaching down the line?
I do not believe and never said that all people who go to HYPS would make good teachers, or that only people who go to HYPS would make good teachers. This is a complete misunderstanding of my post.
Firstly, I said “top-tier”, not “HYPS”. I would include at least the top 30 ranked schools here. For example, NYU Stern is certainly a top-tier school for Wall Street recruiters. Then the point of my comment was that I assume that SOME of the graduates from top-tier schools would make good teachers. However, the people from these schools who could make good teachers can also get much higher-paying jobs that would allow them to buy a home, raise a family, and send their kids to college.They also often have college loans to pay off. So I would wager that very, very few of these people go into teaching (other than a brief stint as Teach for American fellow).
Wouldn’t we as a nation want to invest in our kids by encouraging the very best people to teach them?
I think anyone who says it would be a “waste” to pay excellent people enough to motivate them to go into and stay in teaching has the wrong priorities. Of course, oligarchs prefer to keep the masses stupid so that they will make willing and cheap worker-slaves. In addition, higher teacher salaries might shrink the applicant pool for the oligarchic industries.
Comparing beginning teachers to working as a beginning programmer is insane, not only because beginning CS employees generate some of the highest starting salaries straight out of college, or because the tech industry is centered in one of the most expensive places to live in the country, but because the jobs are different in every conceivable way. And no @cobrat, the hours required by both jobs are not a wash. I am a husband, son, step son, son in law (both in laws) and nephew to teachers. I happen to know two people very well who are programmers, one who spent the bulk of his career designing games for a huge company, which I always thought was just about the coolest job going. First, the hours and working conditions are not remotely similar. Do teachers work more than 180 days a year, 7 hours a day? Yes. But it is not a 10 hour a day, 50 week year either.
Second, how many kids are coming out of school with CS degrees and how many with BSEs? Do you think that is by accident? To blithely assume that every kid in the school of education has the aptitude and interest to succeed as a CS major is one heck of an assumption. So @Plotinus, I would again that if you believe teachers are under compensated, what types of jobs do you think someone with a BSE is qualified for, and what are the salary and benefits for that job?
Third, none of you are acknowledging benefits (except @HarvestMoon1), which are a huge advantage to the young teacher. How many private sector companies heavily subsidize health insurance, provide a guaranteed pension program, ten or more paid holidays, plenty of vacation (no matter how much lesson planning and professional development is done in the summer) and some form of disability insurance walking in the door?
Something I never really understood was why people are willing to forgo higher salaries to be a college professor, but not to be a high school teacher. The salary of an assistant professor of a branch campus of my state flagship is about the same as the starting salary of a K-12 teacher (with a masters and additional credits) in the city that my state flagship is located it in. I’m sure that the former is a much much more competitive job to get than the latter. Yet somehow people will put themselves through a lot to become a college professor, but avoid being a teacher if possible.
This is the opposite of what I said. What I said is that almost all the people who are qualified in STEM are NOT going into teaching. This entails that my position is that most of the people in schools of education ARE NOT qualified in STEM.
Please read my comments more carefully and do not misrepresent them.
However bad the working conditions may be for video game programmers (although you claim it is a the “coolest” job), people with the skill set, social conscience, and desire to be teachers are frequently motivated or compelled to accept these worse conditions but better-paying jobs because people cannot raise their children, buy a home, pay for college, save for retirement on a teacher’s salary.
It is an incredibly sad statement on our society that writing video games – something with often negative social value – pays so much more than teaching our children math and science – something with enormous social value.
Benefits are great, but they cannot make up for a salary that is too low to pay for what used to be the basics of middle class life: buy a home, put your kids through college, pay for health care, have a decent retirement. We are not talking about luxury vacation homes in the Bahamas or fancy cars. Just the basic middle class American life. This is out of reach on a teacher’s salary.
My daughter is 26 and is a NYC public school teacher. She has 30 credits above her master’s degree, which is the top of the pay scale. She does very well financially because in addition to her salary, she teaches in the after school program twice a week and in the summer school program, and she also coaches a sport. She has amazing medical benefits with very little out of pocket, she got most of her 30+ credits through the union at an insanely reasonable price. She works hard, of course, but in her particular school, she is treated with respect. Her principal appreciates and supports the teachers and has helped my daughter get a couple of certifications for things that he got grant money to pay for. She teaches middle school special education, which is not a particularly sought after field, but you will never find anyone who loves her job more than my daughter. She works hard, but honestly, most young people I know who are building their careers work hard with long hours, so we all see that as a good thing. She has a lovely apartment (she does commute), has been to the Caribbean this year and will be going to Europe over winter recess. Most of the teachers we know live very nice middle class lives or upper middle class lives. Her particular school has a lot of teachers her age, and they are all living very nice young professional lives. Do they have the salaries of first year Big Law associates? No. But they don’t have the debt or risk, either. Most of them either do commute or have roommates, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary about that in NYC.
And doesn’t the term “benefits” generally include health insurance?
I think the two jobs appeal to and suit quite a different group of people. I am a college professor, although not extremely badly paid fortunately, but my alternative plans would never, ever, have included being a school teacher. I would rather design doodads for Big Widget Company, or operate a pizza place.
A major difference is that a college professor does not ‘teach’ in anything like the same way, and is in the classroom very few hours a year. Another difference is that an introvert can be OK in most university contexts, in a typical middle school maybe not.
Why wouid anyone want to go into teaching given the disdain a large minority of people have about them and the fact that these people wouid pay them even less and take away their benefits if they could? Ditto for all government employees.
@zoosermom Kudos to your daughter. NYC is a great place for young professionals with no children. Does your daughter have or plan to have children? How many kids and how does she plan to pay for child care, schooling and college? Does she own or rent? If she is sharing a rental, how will that work out if she wants to have a family?
None of my comments about teacher pay are meant to apply to single people with no children.