I met a young father who is just starting a job as a teacher in the Cambridge Public Schools ($26,337 spent per pupil back in 2009; expenses forecast to rise at 3 percent per year so the 2013 number should be $29,642 if the number of students remains constant (note that these numbers do not include capital spending)). The union contract says that teachers with a master’s degree would start in 2011 at $46,541 and, after 10 years and a few continuing education credits, be earning $85,048. Working hours for elementary school teachers are from 8:10 am until 2:35 pm, 183 days per year. The elementary school teacher also gets a lunch period and “no less than forty (40) continuous minutes of daily, duty free preparation time.”
“I’m very excited about this job,” said the father, who then added that he and his family were moving to Brookline, Massachusetts, across the river from Cambridge and a truly hellish commute via the MBTA (Green Line into Boston and then Red Line back out). I asked why he didn’t move to Cambridge instead, so that he would be able to walk to work. “I would never want my children to attend the Cambridge Public Schools,” he replied.
Doing the math, a 6 hour 25 minute day, minus a 25 minute work break (but counting the paid prep time) comes out to 1098 hours a year. $46,541 a year is $42.38 for each of those hours, while $85,048 is $77.46 an hour. Not bad.
Lee: Your calculation isn’t complete if you want to compare to private sector wages. The teacher in Massachusetts will retire on 80% salary with an inflation-adjusted taxpayer-guaranteed pension. For the person who starts fresh out of college, age 22, the 80% pension level would be reached at age 57 according to http://www.mass.gov/mtrs/docs/active/retpercentchart.pdf
(a teacher who is able to get a doctor to certify that he or she is disabled may get earlier/larger benefits)
The school system’s booklet for taxpayers indicates that about the same amount is spent on benefits and pensions as on teacher salaries. So it seems safe to estimate the total comp at $85/hour for the newly hired 22-year-old and $155/hour for the 32-year-old “veteran” teacher.
You guys are funny. What makes you think a teacher only works from 8:10 to 2:35? I’m a teacher in a private school, with lots of experience (so I have lots of lesson plans already prepared) and a small number of kids (compared to public school teachers) and yet I still put in at minimum 10 hours a week outside of school hours. This poor guy who is new to teaching will spend something like 20 or more hours a week preparing lessons, grading papers, and just plain devising ways to get the kids excited and interested. There is no way to get prep work done during the school day. “40 minutes” of prep time is nothing, is no time at all, especially for a new teacher. I just figured out my hourly salary, using a 40 hour work week (I’m counting 10 hours of prep time and 30 hours of student-contact time a week) and 190 days of teaching and I come out to $46 an hour. As a “veteran” teacher. God I wish I was making $155 an hour. Or even $85. With all due respect, I think you might re-think your math and your understanding of a teaching job.
I hit “post comment” one second too soon….. benefits are another story, I will concede. But I don’t really know because I don’t have anything that resembles public school benefits…..
AJ: Congratulations on your dedication to the job and the kids. You are a great advertisement for private school!
The public school teachers that I’ve talked to say that they can, optionally, work more than the required number of hours but that they cannot be fired or denied pay raises if they choose to do the bare minimum. http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_22454531?source=inthenews seems to be typical (California teacher who earned “tenure” after two years and then could not be fired even after kicking a five-year-old). The article says that fewer than 10 teachers are fired each year out of a total of 300,000 teachers. It seems, however, that those 10 teachers are not fired for incompetence at teaching. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/stacie-halas-porn-actress-teacher_n_2486138.html is an article about a teacher who was fired for having, prior to her starting work as a teacher, appeared in a porn movie. A friend who is a tenured professor at a state university says “I can be fired for any reason… except incompetence.”
I have so many mixed feelings about tenure. Obviously, I don’t have it, not at our private school. But I am torn when it comes to public schools. It’s so easy for a perfectly good teacher to be falsely accused of something, and it’s so easy for a horrible teacher to stay employed without consequences. So tenure has very strong positive points and pretty damning negative points.
Certainly something needs to be done about that and, to me, it seems there is a common sense solution – although common sense doesn’t exist in large bureaucracies! (like the LA public school system) Maybe big systems should be broken into much smaller ones, so that teacher performance can actually be known by the higher-ups, in the same way my head-of-school is quite aware of my abilities in the classroom….no need for student testing to ascertain my effectiveness.
Still – be careful of painting teachers with a broad brush, suggesting that they are earning upwards of $100 an hour just because they put in zero effort. I would like to believe that is a very small percentage of teachers, and that most are putting in hard hours and caring about their kids. Always the optimist.
AJ: If we are upset by the injustice of workers being fired, why not have tenure for all American workers? Why is it more unjust for a good teacher to be fired, e.g., because an administrator doesn’t like him/her, than for a McDonald’s fry chef? The long-term consequences of an incompetent worker at McDonald’s (some burned fries; slow drive-through times) are much less than the consequences of an incompetent worker at a school (resulting in 750 children (30 years times 25 kids/year) missing out on a year that could have been spent learning something).
Why would we as a society value justice for workers in public schools more than competence for customers (the children) while at McDonald’s we value justice for workers less than competence and quality as experienced by customers?
Okay, I’m seeing $29k spent per student quoted here. That’s outside capital spending so land and buildings are extra. The average class size is sixteen pupils.
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/students/classsizebygenderpopulation.aspx?orgcode=00490000
That adds up to just under $480,000 per year for operations. Now suppose that accountants, diversity officers, lobbyists, and janitors make up half the employment cost and teachers the other half.
That leaves the classroom teachers $240,000 each. It’ll be a little less because there are rotating enrichments and high school students might take more classes than a teacher teaches in a day. Call it $200,000.
A starting teacher makes $46k. With pension effort and health care and FICA contributions and other gold plated benefits, that probably adds up to $92k. (Seriously, public employees make more in benefits than salary; the benefits are truly excellent.) For the experienced teacher, we’re looking at $170k.
So obviously money is leaking somewhere. Average $92k and $170k and you’ll still come in way below $200k. The most likely thing is that two-thirds of the salary spending is outside the classroom instead of half.
I can only imagine what indispensable services all those bureaucrats re providing to the community. I bet if I asked some classroom teachers, they could give me an earful about it.
I note that when these discussions of teacher’s salaries arise on the internet, the teacher’s tend to defend themselves by describing how hard they work. I would point out that professionals are not paid to work hard, but to achieve results.
I would go a bit further suggest that since, at any one time, we are educating several million elementary school children, perhaps time spent in developing a custom lesson plan could be spent elsewhere. I understand that institutional pressures on teachers often prevent them from working efficiently, but I would point out that teachers, working collectively as in teacher’s unions, do not seem concerned with this.
Brian said, “I note that when these discussions of teacher’s salaries arise on the internet, the teacher’s tend to defend themselves by describing how hard they work. I would point out that professionals are not paid to work hard, but to achieve results.”
I’ve worked in other jobs besides teaching – corporate, retail, and engineering r&d jobs. I know what hard work is and I am not saying teachers work harder than people in other jobs, but they work AS hard, in different ways. Granted we get the summer off and that is a HUGE bonus (can’t deny it). Plus if one is any good as a teacher, one is working to achieve results – educating students in the classroom and helping them succeed (with or without standardized tests).
I don’t even understand the second paragraph. Are you suggesting teachers all use a standard lesson plan? If so, I have plenty to say about that idea.
Phil said, “Why is it more unjust for a good teacher to be fired, e.g., because an administrator doesn’t like him/her.”
Because we are not talking about an administrator not liking a teacher. It can also be a student or a parent or another teacher. The possibilities for cruel lies and innuendo can ruin a good teacher’s reputation if s/he doesn’t have some protection. I’ve seen a parent begin a vendetta against a perfectly good teacher, because her child struggled in the classroom. Those things can escalate and that’s where tenure and the union can help out.
I TOTALLY agree that an incompetent teacher needs to be removed from the classroom, but there has to be a logical and rational way to ascertain that teacher’s competence.
AJ: “Cruel lies and innuendo” happen in all kinds of social (see the movie Heathers!) and work situations. Suppose that cruel lies and innuendo were causing some airline pilots and mechanics to be fired unreasonably. Would you then say “We need a multi-year logical and rational way to leave the pilot or mechanic in the job while we figure out whether or not the person is competent”? If you would be reluctant to fly on an airline where pilots and mechanics could not be fired, why would you want to send your child to a school where teachers could not be fired?
As for the idea of developing a “logical and rational way” to sort out the spectacularly incompetent from there merely substandard, but tenured, it seems safe to say that states such as California and New York have had their best minds developing such systems for decades. The result is what we have today (10 teachers out of 300,000 being fired per year, for example). There is no reason to think that our government bureaucracies are going to develop better systems in the future. Today’s Americans are not smarter than the Americans of the 1970s, for example.
[Separately the idea that teachers are working “hard” because of hours that they voluntarily put in beyond the 6-hour mandatory day doesn’t make conceptual sense to me. The teachers are not required to do anything beyond the 6-hour day. Without fear of being fired, they could spend their not-at-school time doing anything that they want (except starring in porn movies). So if they are doing something school-related by definition it is because they enjoy that school-related activity (or enjoy the fruits of the activity). The time beyond the 6-hour day is volunteer work, essentially. If you see someone volunteering at a non-profit do you say “He is working so hard, he should get paid a lot more than the $0 that he is currently being paid”?]
But really all of this is sort of off topic from the original posting. We have a lavishly funded school system with people who are enthusiastic about working there as teachers and yet the students, on average, aren’t learning much. That’s an interesting phenomenon.
I’m pushing fifty-one years of age so maybe things are different now, but when I was in elementary school we all took the same classes, just at different “levels”. Typically there would be a level 1, level 2 and level 3. The level 1 kids were the brightest and the classes were the most difficult. The level 2 kids were average students and the classes were consequently somewhat easier and the level 3 children were the dumbest (sorry!) and their classes were the most simplified versions.
Fast forward 35 years and I see some of my childhood acquaintances teaching school and you guessed it…several were level 2 or 3 students! I shudder to think these adults, many of whom were of average or below average intelligence-level students themselves are now TEACHING our children.
My point is maybe the whole system in skewed to give very average people the arguably most important job on earth. The other night on a business TV program a billionaire said the quickest way to better educate our children is to double the salaries of our teachers, thereby attracting the best and brightest. I would add that we also increase the educational requirements needed to become a public teacher.
I have no problem with public educators making big money, as long as they perform at a high level, i.e. produce some bright students.
Philg,
A few comments:
1) Teaching is not as posh a job as people think it to be. The burnout rate is quite high:
http://thejournal.com/articles/2011/11/03/teacher-burnout.aspx
(It says that teaching has the highest burnout rate of any public sector job.)
If it were such a great career, then more of the “best and brightest” would decide upon going into the profession. Unfortunately, in modern day America, the respect for the teaching profession has plummeted. Ed schools are getting second-rate applicants. This was not always true.
2) I contend that the way to get better educators is to make the profession as elite as say, engineering, by making the profession more difficult to go into (with more rigorous preparation) and higher starting pay.
3) It would be great to have a set of valid metrics to decide teacher effectiveness. Unfortunately, that is not very easy to do. The system is not a meritocracy. Kissing ass is, as with many other jobs the way to secure ones’ position.
4) I have a crude theory as to what makes great teachers:
(i) Mastery of the content of what they teach.
(ii) Mastery in transmission.
(iii) gravitas
As for (i), Ed schools don’t bother much with content these days and that’s a big shame. Ed schools concentrate on (ii), by showing the Ed school student how to draw a vertical line on the blackboard (or smart board, as the case may be) and by
emphasis on the lesson plan. In other words, (ii) is mostly about form.
As for (iii), I don’t think that’s something one can train people to acquire. The teachers who had the greatest effect on me somehow had it because I wanted to emulate them.
Greetings from Copenhagen.
John: The article you cite says that “young teachers leave the profession at a rate 51 percent higher than older teachers”. That’s not surprising given that older teachers get paid approximately twice as much (depending on union agreement). Older teachers also are a lot closer to the beginning of their taxpayer-guaranteed inflation-adjusted stream of pension checks. It is also not surprising that young teachers are more likely to move and/or change school systems than older more settled workers.
Teachers are probably underpaid relative to other government workers (e.g., California prison guards (see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704132204576285471510530398.html for how 120,000 people applied for 900 spots). And http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2011-07-18-fderal-job-security_n.htm found that at many government agencies a worker is more likely to die than to be fired. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm says that a typical private sector worker has a 1.8 percent chance of quitting in any given month. A government worker has only a 0.6 percent chance of quitting.
But http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/10/assessing-the-compensation-of-public-school-teachers looks at what happens to teachers who quit to take a non-teaching job (generally their wages are lower). The conclusion is that, including pension, a public school teacher earns about 52% more than he or she would earn in the private sector (costing taxpayers an extra $120 billion per year).
[I was on an airplane flight sitting next to a school superintendent from Colorado. She said that compensation in her district was so attractive that if her teachers quit she could replace all of them within one week, except for the math and science teachers. And that was before the Collapse of 2008 trashed private sector job opportunities.]
I think the existing hiring/firing system wasn’t designed to provide “justice” for teachers but to prevent these jobs from becoming patronage. It seems clear that government institutions are not able to deal effectively with the new challenges we are throwing at them. However, any reforms must also address those potential problems which the existing system has already solved and which we may not be as aware of because they were solved so long ago.
Have had afew discussions about teachers recently. I send my kids to NYC public school in Brooklyn. Teachers are very good in the school but the school isn’t highly rated as it is diverse and about 40% of the kids get free lunch. Would recommend all the teachers my kids have had over the last 5 years as they have all been active in helping my kids and done what you would expect good teachers to do. Good luck figuring out a way to fairly judge teachers based on testing etc. I just can’t see how you will get a valid metric in schools like ours.
That being said public sector teachers don’t seem to be underpaid. They get pretty much what society says they deserve. AJ, when I have done the math for people about teacher’s hourly rate I always get that extra preparation response. My response is tell me what professional out there does not have the same type of out of workday prep. I know that I do and my wife who is a lawyer most definitely does. Teachers aren’t getting rich but they are not paupers either.
Hey Phil,
When I read your post a few days ago I mentally bookmarked to come back to the site and see how many (mostly angry, I figured) responses you got from teachers. I will admit, it’s less than I expected.
On a personal level, I worked in the Administration side of education (admittedly at the higher education level, but I believe my experience would apply at the K-12 level) and I will admit, the overall compensation package was outstanding. My salary was approximately 20% less than my previous private industry position, but I received about 6 weeks of paid vacation (plus Federal holidays off, plus a Winter/Christmas break for an entire week), top flight health benefits at little cost, my choice of a pension or $3 (school):$1 (me) matching for investing, along with all sorts of great perks. An unreal package. I personally estimated it as a 30% raise over any job I had had in the past, and that was in the cash benefits alone. I personally love free time more than work (which I also generally enjoy) so all that time off was far more valuable to me than it would be to a lot of folks. When I decided to move on (wanted to move closer to family) my boss apologized for not being able to pay me market rates. I had to laugh and assure him I was being more than fairly compensated for my work. I gave the controller of my next company the outline of my benefits and he seriously told me he would work for them for free – between the pension, free-ish health insurance, free education for offspring alone he thought the pay was going to be better than he was making at his current job (he was admittedly a 3/4 time employee at that time).
As you touched on in both the article and here in the comments, the starting pay for a teacher is exceptionally poor, leading to poor retention. Not even calculated in those costs are the opportunity costs of losing top flight talent in the first place (something private industry is better able to conceptualize and put a dollar amount to). I was strongly influenced to get into the development field by a high school teacher. Later in my career I considered entering in to the K-12 educational field proper. I have a technically oriented bachelors, a masters degree in economics and I’ve taught at the college level. But the pay is start pay is so low; It’s asking a lot for a “grown up” to eat dog food for a few years until they are in the gravy of the later years of their K-12 teaching tenure. I believe in a competitive teaching market people with a similar resume would receive a competitive salary, would deliver a high quality level of education and, with enough talent entering the market, we may actually see significant changes in quality. Anything short of a freer market to me seems to be rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. Unless you’re willing to change the rules of the game, you’re still playing the same game. Disrupt the system.
I am very pessimistic on the chances of that occurring, alas. As evidenced by my generous package, teachers unions are the new Teamsters. The strongest union there is. They have an added weapon in their holster: children. We all universally want children to be well educated, safe and happy. Teachers unions are able to manipulate that to their benefit much easier than say, a group of auto workers.