Plotinus, she currently rents but has her downpayment ready to go. She lives alone in an 1100 square foot apartment. She hopes to have children someday as a married person with a partner with a job. She will arrange childcare as her working, middle class parents have done, by working out and paying for what works best at any given time. My daughter makes more than a lot of middle class people, people who work for the city in other capacities, as well as people in the private sector. I think you are completely wrong about your perception because, again, my husband is a city worker and I’m a non-college educated working person. This is our class, family and friends. Teachers do well when married, most own houses and send their kids to college. Interestingly, many send their kids to private schools all the way through. You really do discount the benefits issue. I’m a paralegal, and my benefits (which are not comparable to my daughter’s) would cost me $1300 per month. My husband has the same benefits as my daughter (exactly the same), and we pay $120 per month. I also don’t have prescription or dental coverage at all with my employer. I would like to see teachers paid a lot more and given more respect, but in some places, teachers are doing just fine.
What exactly am I misrepresenting? You have consistently stated that we need to provide “competitive” salaries for young educators. I have asked I think three times now what does “competitive” mean within the context of people who are, in your words, “highly qualified”. So far, the only comparisons offered by either you or @cobrat are to kids from top 30 or so schools working on Wall Street or kids working at Google or Microsoft. This is of course only after these same kids are given a completely free ride through college in exchange for a promise to teach for five years while making salaries at the very top of the food chain for graduates with bachelor’s degrees.
Of course they do. It happens all the time. My in laws were both teachers. They raised five kids. Several of my wife’s colleagues are married to other teachers (I know this because her district briefly went on strike this year, and she was very worried about the two teacher families). The median high school teacher’s salary in 2014 according to the BLM was $56,310. This by itself is sufficient to put a family of four into the lower middle class (according to Pew). A two teacher household would generate $112,620 in income, more than enough to raise a family and live comfortably in the vast majority of the country. Does that mean that a kid fresh out of college in his first job teaching fifth grade can buy a house and start putting money into a college savings account? No. But how many people can in their first job after a bachelor’s degree?
And I am sorry, but I can’t conceive of someone who wants to be a teacher enjoying being a computer programmer. They are completely different jobs, with completely different skill sets and challenges. As a really simple example, I would hate being a teacher, because I would hate the regimentation of the job, having to be at school at x time, not leave until y, pre determined time off, dealing with all the administrative bs, etc. My wife on the other hand would hate being a lawyer. She likes the schedule and hates conflict. Different strokes. You can’t just look to the highest compensated jobs and say see, if we paid all teachers this much we would find more attractive candidates.
First, benefits obviously effect how much you “pay for health care” or need to “have a decent retirement”. Teachers’ benefits in both respects are way, way beyond the norm today. When I was in private practice and my wife was home with the kids, I was paying just around $1,000 a month for health care for a family of four. When my wife went to work her district offered better insurance for I think $80 bucks a month. Granted that is an extreme example because I was a partner at a law firm and got no real employer benefit for health insurance, but still teacher’s health benefits are insanely good. Somehow that doesn’t count as compensation? Similarly, how many kids coming out of undergrad today are finding jobs with guaranteed pensions? Not a lot. To not count these benefits as part of the compensation for young teachers is unfair. Secondly, in my own personal experience, the single greatest benefit to having an educator spouse is the fact that their schedule more or less lines up with the kids’ schedule. I am aware of no other profession that provides that benefit. That may be unimportant to some, but it was a huge boon to our family unrelated to income.
And sorry, but teacher compensation is not “too low to pay for the basics of middle class life”. It may be too low for the CC “we are middle class but would be full pay at an Ivy” crowd, making a couple/three hundred k a year with a house in San Jose or Westchester County. In pretty much every where else in the country a two teacher household would be solidly in the middle to upper middle class.
In my experience, people go into teaching because they think it is a worthwhile way to spend their professional lives, and it allows for a certain lifestyle that is appealing to a large number of people, even if that means they will never live on the Upper West Side or lease a Mercedes.
As a government employee, I will say that there were pretty obvious and stark lifestyle reasons to choose to leave private practice. And not insignificantly, I told myself that I could either continue to whine and complain about the government or I could go and try to see what I could do from this side.
@Ohiodad51, My mom was a teacher and my H is a government employee. Imo, it’s a very different environment today. The best and the brightest just will not subject themselves to the abuse heaped upon them when they have so many more options (especially women.)
I am a native New Yorker and while I admire your daughter’s dedication to teaching, your account does not correlate at all with my experience or the experience of dozens of my colleagues and friends, who include many, many teachers and also university professor who had to leave NYC once they had children because they could not afford to stay.
Purchasing an 1100 square foot apartment in NYC would run at least 1 million dollars. Just the rent on this kind of apartment would run 3-4k per month.
Child care runs at least 15k per year per kid.
Private school, 30-40k per year per kid.
Private college, 60k per year per kid.
I am not understanding the math here.
Emilybee, I respectfully disagree. There are a lot of “best and brightest” teachers in the current age range for the usual reasons of wanting to teach or wanting a flexible career for family, but it’s become common even in the best schools for young people to be so concerned with the economy that they perceive teaching as a safe, stable career with good benefits and less risk. Whether those people would have chosen this career if they weren’t insecure in the economy is anyone’s guess.
Well my son did get into an Ivy League school but even with the scholarship offered, my husband and I could not afford to send him on our 2 teachers’ salaries. I assume his place went to a video game programmer’s kid with worse academic credentials.
@emilybee, maybe. But the fact is that as of right now, except in certain distinct areas (according to my wife, certain foreign languages being a biggie), there are far more kids with BSE’s than jobs available. That said, it is certainly tough at times to be a teacher. As I said up the thread, my wife’s district briefly went on strike this year and she took the comments at the board meetings and on the news coverage pretty hard.
And saying something controversial, I am not sure we need or want the “best and brightest” to be teachers. Most of the people I know who are really at the top of the heap in a particular discipline would make horrible teachers. They tend to be easily distracted, often impatient, very demanding and quite often jerks. Not a great skill set for a high school teacher, know what I mean?
It’s not my math, that’s the problem. It’s your blinders.
NYC is comprised of five boroughs, not one. As I said twice, she commutes.
She has an apartment that would cost a million dollars in Manhattan. She rents is for $1200 including utilities.
I suspect another problem is that you aren’t familiar with the true middle class. Childcare and tuition doesn’t cost that much outside of Manhattan, not by a long shot, and it is common for teachers to work summer jobs or provide daycare to family members or friends who do the same for them during the school year. And when you pair a teacher with a police officer, a sanitation worker or another teacher, you get up to or above $200,000 per year. Plenty enough for a middle class life.
Presumably it depends on the school district/state/government agency. But I do not see heaps of abuse on teachers or government employees in my corner of the world. And no shortages of people looking for those jobs (our school district gets hundreds of applications for every job opening for instance).
But if that is the case where you live, I would expect there will be problems filling teacher/government employee positions and quality of candidates will drop as well. Districts/agencies at that point have a choice to make: accept the level of candidates they are getting, increase pay/benefits to attract more/better candidates, decrease services or find a way to reduce the heaps of abuse.
My oldest is at an Ivy, and we would be able to easily afford to send him there if our combined income was twice my wife’s. In fact it would probably be easier than it is now, because he would qualify for more aid.
My wife has only been teaching for about ten years, but has a MS plus 15 (maybe 20 now, I don’t know), so while she is probably lower on one axis of the salary step increase graph than most teachers with college age children, she is at the top of the other axis. How much that matters, I don’t know. We live in the midwest and not NYC which I would be willing to bet makes a difference.
@zoosermom is correct, there are still areas of NYC that are relatively (and that is relatively) afffordable, if you don’t want to live in one of the “hip” areas or in most of Manhattan. There are places in Queens outside of Long Island City or Astoria where the rents are affordable, and there are places like Riverdale in the Bronx, Marble Hill, or even in the Pelham Parkway area where you can get an affordable place (though they are rapidly gentrifying, too). Likewise, in Brooklyn, in you are willing to commute and not go into the Brooklyn Heights/Williamsburg/Park Slope kind of places (guy at work just bought a house in an area called Windsor Terrace, that was 1.5 million and it is a row house, nothing special). Not arguing NYC is ridiculous (I hear the South Bronx is starting to gentrify, that one amazes me)…so she isn’t making it up. Even in Manhattan, you can find some decent apartments in the Washington Heights/Inwood area still.
“Presumably it depends on the school district/state/government agency. But I do not see heaps of abuse on teachers or government employees in my corner of the world. And no shortages of people looking for those jobs (our school district gets hundreds of applications for every job opening for instance).”
@saillakeerie, You should read the Letters to the Editors whenever the teaching profession/goverment workers are the topics of an article.
Or just mosy over to the ACA thread for what people think about their tax money going to government workers.
My district pays very well and the teachers union is very strong in NY. Not so in other parts of the country and some states don’t even allow a union.
And I’m sure you have heard the disdain in which people all over the country think about teacher’s union and other public employee unions. If not, you must be living under a rock.
Emily, I think you’re absolutely right about the public disdain. It most assuredly exists in a lot of places.
So the TRUE middle class does not live in Manhattan? And of course that is a good thing. We should keep Manhattan pristine of riff-raff for the oligarchs.
So to be able to live on a teacher’s salary, you have to have free childcare? This free childcare prerequisite would certainly narrow the available pool of teachers quite a bit.
Where in the world are you getting these numbers from? You think sanitation workers make 100k? How about a reference for this?
Try to google police officer salary in NYC: median 53K
sanitation worker NYC: 39k
sanitation cleaner NYC: 28k
teacher NYC with BA and no experience: 51k
teacher with MA and no experience: 58k
teacher with MA and 8 years experience plus additional coursework: 81k
http://schools.nyc.gov/nr/rdonlyres/eddb658c-be7f-4314-85c0-03f5a00b8a0b/0/salary.pdf
Please note that these are all pre-tax figures. Assuming a 15% Federal tax bracket, federal, state and local taxes and FICa would take at least a third of the salary.
The true middle class mostly does live outside of Manhattan. That’s been an issue for decades.
I never said anything about free childcare. Please don’t put words in my keyboards. I said they pay people and make what arrangements are best for their families at a particular time. That was shamefully dishonest.
You don’t know me, but other posters do. My husband IS a NYC sanitation worker. He makes around $120-$130,000 per year. That information is public. The base salary is $69, but that doesn’t include things like driving a truck, picking up garbage, dumping garbage, or snow - which is double time at 12 hours a day, sometimes 7 days a week for weeks. It’s you who has no idea what you’re talking about. The labor contracts are public, and there is an entire website dedicated to listing the salary of every single NYC employee (except teachers) by name and by year. If you know any of those actual workers (do you?), you could look up their names and see exactly what they have earned.
here’s a reference, but google is your friend, too.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-high-pay/
And teachers in NYC MUST have a master’s within five years, so that BA isn’t an option.
I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but it’s not that middle class people don’t live in Manhattan, it is that the perspective of what is normal or middle class from Manhattan, the Bay area or any of the other insanely high cost of living parts of the country really skews what is normal or middle class in the rest of the country. It is not hard for me to believe that it would be difficult for two younger teachers to find decent housing and raise kids in at least parts of Manhattan. In Columbus, Dallas, Houston, St Louis, Minneapolis, etc its not really a problem.
Even with your own numbers though, two teachers with an MA plus 8 in Manhattan are making $162,000 a year in what is probably their late twenties/early thirties. That still puts that couple well into the upper middle class just by simple math. And where will those salaries be when that same couple has college age kids? Gotta be $200,000 ish or more, right? That’s easily top 5% nationally in wage earnings. If that isn’t enough to put a kid through college, then maybe the problem isn’t the salary but the cost of living in Manhattan. Might make more sense for that hypothetical young couple to commute, like @zoosermom’s daughter. People make choices like that every day, all over the country, depending on what they personally value.
Even so @Plotinus, it is not clear what you want. Do you deserve 2-3x higher salary, or should 2-3x higher salary be offered to replace you and most other existing teachers with top 2% STEM graduates and other graduates of elite colleges?
Speaking as a college faculty member, the tradeoff in higher ed (at least for those of us in tenure-stream positions) is that you get paid less than you could get in private industry, but you’re more self-directed in both your teaching and (for those of us whose assignments have a research component) your research. So basically, it comes down to money vs. independence for many of us, really.
Also, I’m no economist, but those who are comparing the number of students graduating with education degrees with the (smaller) number of students graduating with, e.g., computer science degrees and saying that there’s more of the former than the latter and so therefore the education graduates are of course paid less, well, yeah, that’s an accurate description of the supply side of the equation, but it sees to me that there’s a pretty huge demand for K–12 teachers, as well. That has to be taken into consideration for such arguments, too.
(And no, I don’t know the numbers for any of the fields being discussed—but it’s being frustrating to me to see the one half referenced but not the other, repeatedly.)
Also, abilities in STEM are not as incompatible with K–12 teaching as some on this thread seem to think—in my state (among a few others), the normal path to secondary teaching as a career is to get a bachelor’s in one’s area of expertise (which for a science teacher would be something like biology or chemistry or physics or such, and for a math teacher would be math or stats), followed by a masters in teaching that includes certification.
Same here.