According to the above study by Pew Research, in 1960 only 25% of households had 2 incomes. The number of 1 and 2 income households first became equal in 1980 and 2-income households reached 60% only in 1990. Even in 2010, the number was only 60%, which is significantly less than 2/3.
I am not suggesting that women should stay home. I am suggesting that salaries have been halved and the profits put in the pockets of the oligarchs.
I completely agree. However, if education is a primary path to socio-economic mobility, teachers have a particularly important role in addressing the problem.
And where would the kids go to elementary, middle, and high school to get the kind of education that would allow them to be admitted to Ivy League schools?
And how would they accumulate the EC’s required to be admitted to Ivy League schools?
Here’s a challenge: any parents living in NYC today on 1 teacher income with 4 kids put through ANY private college? Please let us know.
Someone upthread mentioned that it occurred during the Great Depression when many PhDs flocked to teaching in ordinary/challenging areas of NYC.
I also recalled reading from a dead-tree article that up until the late '60s/early '70s, the best and the brightest women who were college graduates…especially those from the elite Seven Sisters went into teaching in large numbers because it was one of the few professions requiring higher education which was open to them back then.
However, once many more professions became open to them and the perceived respectability of the teaching profession among many Americans…especially those in other upper/upper-middle class professions declined, most of the best and the brightest…including women opted for more respectable/lucrative professions in lieu of teaching.
It’s one reason why according to several friends who are currently teachers, M.Ed/ed school classmates and fellow incoming teacher cohort-mates who were topflight undergrads…especially from elite undergrad colleges were in their observation one of the groups most likely to burnout/leave before they’ve reached their 5th year of teaching.
One major factor other than finding K-12 teaching wasn’t suitable for them is that they had plenty of other great/greater career options from a perceived respectability and often…financial standpoints.
This is certainly underscored by the CS friend’s case of starting out at $80k/year at his first programming job straight out of undergrad in the mid-'00s I made in an earlier post. That’s despite the fact he graduated with less than a 3.0 cumulative average from a university ranked well below the top 50.
Well if we have to go back to the Great Depression (or maybe the late 60s/early70s) for when the best and brightest went into teaching, when did the heaps of abuse on teachers driving the best and brightest away from teaching start?
I I think we need people who are highly qualified, very good to great teachers, and will stay in teaching. Whether they are “the best and the brightest” in some abstract sense is less important. Any reasonable hiring selection procedure would involve an observed lesson.
From what I’ve heard from older teachers who started their careers in the '40s, '50s and early '60s, it started in the mid-late '70s and accelerated in the '80s with the increasing glamorization of careers in the private sector…especially finance and corporate management. Came as a great shock considering they recalled being treated with far greater respect by students, parents across SES, and the larger society earlier in their careers.
In the same period, there was also the increasing trend of politicians using teachers as an effective punching bag/scapegoat for the social/educational ills…many of which were caused by municipal neglect/shrinking of educational budgets which started in the late '60s, social/economic challenges well outside the scope of any individual teacher/school system to solve*, etc.
Got to see some of the effects of this firsthand in my public middle and the old building of my public magnet in the late '80s/early '90s which had gym bathrooms with non-functioning/destroyed showerheads/plumbing, damaged/destroyed toilets, non-functional water faucets, peeling paint, etc. Some older HS alums have recounted on our alum online forum that those effects were already apparent when they attended in the early-mid '80s.
In short, an effort by politicians and many Americans to offload as much blame as possible for such issues onto the shoulders of teachers...whether individually or as a profession.
I’m sure it’s been mentioned on this thread but I can’t remember it, but Larry Arnn, currently president of Hillsdale College, has been floated for SoEd.
The idea of someone leading the DoEd who’s done everything possible to distance his institution from said department is…intriguing.
I had heard Betsy DeVos’s name floating around … she is a staunch advocate of vouchers. I hadn’t heard Larry Arnn’s name floated around, but it makes sense, since I had heard that the new administration had made noise about wanting to dismantle ED. Scary, if you ask me. As a financial aid professional, these folks being discussed scare me for reasons beyond our K-12 system. The thought of student loans possibly being returned to private banks scares me.
And where would the kids go to elementary, middle, and high school to get the kind of education that would allow them to be admitted to Ivy League schools?
And how would they accumulate the EC’s required to be admitted to Ivy League schools?
Here’s a challenge: any parents living in NYC today on 1 teacher income with 4 kids put through ANY private college? Please let us know."
NYC has a number of excellent public schools like Stuyvesant and FLG, for example. My S went to school with several kids who graduated from both those schools. Also kids from Riverdale (Bronx,) Forest Hills (Queens,) and I’m sure other schools high schools in the outer boroughs.
Do you believe that no kid from NYC public schools go/went to a Ivy League schools and their equivalent?
Do you think a teacher with 4 kids and a sahm could afford to live in Forest Hills? I grew up in Queens. Check the real estate prices. We could not afford Forest Hills even back in the 60s and 70s.The public schools in the neighborhood where I grew up are now horrific The neighborhoods with good public schools have very high housing prices, way beyond the budget of a one-teacher-income family of 6.
Again, why do you assume that a family with one middle class income should be able to live wherever they choose? I certainly have no desire to live in New York, but apparently many people do. When many people want to live in one particular place, shouldn’t housing prices reflect supply and demand?
Two years ago when I lived in California, I would have loved a home in San Francisco overlooking the ocean, but I never assumed that I should be able to buy that for the same monthly payment that I paid for my 900 sq ft apartment.
People who are joining this thread in the middle without reading the preceding posts are taking my comments out of context.
I am making the point that middle class living costs have risen over the last few decades at a much, much higher rate than middle class salaries in general and teacher salaries in particular.
I am demonstrating this with the example of my father, who was a NYC public school teacher with 4 kids and a stay at home wife. He was able to raise his family in NYC and send all 4 kids to college, 3 to Ivy League and 1 to SUNY, on 1 teacher salary. My claim is that this would no longer be possible today given the ratio between teacher salaries and housing/schooling-college costs. My conclusion is that teacher salaries (like most middle class salaries) have more or less been halved in real terms.
I am not saying that it SHOULD be possible to live a good middle class lifestyle on one income. I am saying that IT ONCE WAS MUCH EASIER to do so.
A similar point is made by Elizabeth Warren in her book, The Two Income Trap. I am not a great fan of Elizabeth Warren’s, but I think she makes some very good points in this book.
I believe this is a primary reason why many people who might like to be teachers forsake the profession for better paid but less socially useful careers if they have that opportunity. This in turn harms society as a whole because the available pool of teachers is less qualified.
@Plotinus, you don’t know what the people in Forest Hills or Riverdale or SI all paid for their housing. Maybe they are living in the house they grew up with or live with their parents/extended family. But that is really besides the point, as kids from NYS who graduated from public high schools do, in fact, get into a Ivy League and equivalent schools - even those from low SES families and receive fabulous FA from those schools. Are you insinuating that if they are poor or lower middle class they aren’t smart enough to get accepted or their schools are so bad that there is no way they would be accepted?
Go back 20-30 years, and NYC was considered a far less desirable place to live earlier than it is now. Since then there has been more demand, but relatively only slighly higher supply. Prices go up.
Also the often repeated line that real incomes have dropped completely ignores that the cost of benefits paid by the employer, particularly health care, has more than compensated. No doubt that the rich have benefited much more, but median total compensation has also increased.
Actually, Forest Hills and Riverdale real estate even in the '60s and '70s were already high enough that unless one was already from a well-to do upper/upper-middle class family or one of the few lucky enough to buy into those areas when it was relatively cheap(you’d probably have to go back to pre-WWII/Great Depression era), your scenario of people living in the house they grew up with/living with their parents/extended family is an exception, not the rule.
This is especially the case within the last few decades as FH is one of several Queens area neighborhoods which has seen a large influx of well-to-do immigrants and native-born American transplants from other parts of the country in the last 3 or so decades.
A side note regarding FH High school. It’s not limited solely to FH/Rego Park area residents as I know of a couple of recent graduates(within the last 6 years) who attended who weren’t FH/Rego Park residents. However, FH/Rego Park residents do get first priority for places at FH High so the competition for non-FH/Rego residents to attend is quite stiff according to those graduates.
Cobart, please do not lecture me about NYC. I’ve lived there also.
My point was that there are kids who go to “regular” public high schools in NYC who do, in fact, get into Ivy League/equivalent schools from lower and middle class families. They might even go to a private high school in NYC on scholarship, or the less expensive parochial schools.
While true, the quality of regular public high schools in NYC varies quite dramatically.
You have some which are comparable to Stuy and SHS like FH High and Midwood…and then you could have some comparable to my old NYC neighborhood zoned HS which were exceedingly abysmal and where the ~33% graduation rate in the early 2010’s right before it was shut down for underperformance was actually AN IMPROVEMENT compared to when I was a K-12 student and a resident in that neighborhood.
I only knew of a couple of old neighborhood kids who attended our zoned HS who ended up at Ivies/comparable elites.
Both ended up struggling heavily due to inadequate academic preparation. One ended up coming back and finishing up at a local public college after taking several consecutive “gap years” as a result.
This would just prove my point that you can’t raise your kids in Forest Hills on a teacher’s salary alone.
Of course kids graduating from Hunter (my alma mater), Stuyvesant , Bronx Sci, and other NYC and NYS public high schools get into Ivy League schools. This is not my point at all.
The point is that I don’t think any of these Hunter and Stuy kids are non-URG from a family with 4 kids and 1 working parent who is a public school teacher with no other outside sources of wealth or income (e.g., no inherited house in Forest Hills; no free housing from extended family). My guess is that these kids come from smaller families, or their parents are both working, or their parents are not teachers, or they have some outside source of income/wealth, or some mixture of the above, because the dollars of 1 teacher salary would not stretch to cover the costs of raising the family, paying for housing, and doing whatever else it takes today to get the kids into top colleges. In the 1960s and 70s, it was possible to raise 4 non-URG kids in NYC (Queens) and send them all to college, 3 to Ivy League and 1 to SUNY, on a 1 school teacher’s salary. What has happened?
I am not insinuating anything about how smart poor or lower middle class kids are. What does income have to do with intelligence? By some measures, I was lower middle class when I was a child.
However, I do think that most NYC neighborhoods that have better quality public schools have more expensive housing. SImilarly, neighborhoods that have more affordable housing generally have worse quality public schools. As we all know, the quality of the school is a very important factor in the overall trajectory of a child, and a poor school could make it less likely that even a very smart child would be able to do what it takes to be accepted to a top college.
I don’t think parents would be happy to take a chance on putting their kids into a poor quality public school. Many will either move or change to a better paying career so they can put their kids into better schools.