A friend pointed me to a long New York Times article on yet another top-down idea for improving American schools. This is exactly the opposite approach taken by the country with the most effective schools (see my postings on The Smartest Kids in the World, including this one on Finland). To me the most interesting thing about the article is that the author, Andrew Ross Sorkin (“a financial columnist”!), writes toward the end “Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry”. A quick Google search brings up this reasonably thorough study, which comes to the conclusion that public school teachers are paid more than comparable workers in private jobs (a conclusion consistent with the fact that there are many more people who want to be teachers and have the qualifications than there are jobs). The fact-checkers (if there are any at the NYT) wouldn’t even have needed to search the Web but could have poked around in their own archives for stories such as “Still Doing the Math, but for $100K a Year” from 2009 (about teachers getting as much as $130,000 per year, plus benefits and pensions, in the economic wasteland of Rochester, New York).
Wikipedia says that Sorkin went to an expensively funded public high school (Scarsdale) and then an expensive college (Cornell). So his analytical skills are presumably about as good as what an American of his generation can develop.
This is only odd if you think the NYT’s purpose is to disseminate the truth”.
But if government rules “by the consent of the governed” and the function of the media is to “manufacture consent” (Chomsky), this article is clearly “fit for purpose”, and it’s clear why Thomas Friedman earns so much for evangelizing the destruction of the middle-class.via globalization.
http://nypress.com/flathead/
http://nypress.com/flat-n-all-that/
When I was considering a teaching career for myself, one of the surprising things I found out was just how high the barriers to entry were, an impression confirmed by talking to friends and acquaintences who either were teachers or in the process of trying to become teachers. I filed it under one of those facts about modern American life that no one tells you about.
To some extent it depends on the subject matter taught. I just heard a report on the radio about schools wanting to teach their kids more computer skills, but they couldn’t find anyone to fill the positions. So they decided to teach their teachers programming. One of the teachers turned out to be pretty good at it, and self-taught herself some more, and then she left to take a higher paying job as a programmer.
But yes, when it comes to ordinary elementary classroom teachers, if anything, they are overpaid, especially after you take into account the 9 month work year and the pension and benefits.
In the past, there were many private companies with employees represented by unions who over time were able to exact above market wages and benefits for their employees, but most of these companies have gone bankrupt by now (as a result of having to pay same). Since the public sector has the power of taxation, it will take longer for them to go bankrupt, but Detroit is already leading the way.
OTOH, reading Sorkin’s article, the notion of teachers being underpaid did not seem like the primary thrust – it was almost a throwaway line at the end. Newspaper stories are done in an inverse pyramid fashion, so that the editor can cut the story at any point when he runs out of column inches and still print the most important points. This line, in the 2nd to last paragraph, was clearly in throw away territory. I would guess (without myself bothering to do any research) that while most teachers are overpaid, especially at the elementary level (what other jobs could these women do with their qualifications?), at the secondary level in certain technical subjects there might be better paying jobs (at least in terms of gross salary if not lifestyle and benefits) in private industry for some of them.
But this is far from Sorkin’s “almost all of them”. He also mentions “advanced degrees”. In my (limited) experience, to the extent that many school teachers have “advanced degrees”, they are usually masters degrees in education which they have earned in night school because the union pay scale specifies high pay for teachers with masters degrees.
a quick Google search yielded the following:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics average teacher salary (Kinder & Elem School) for 2012 is $53,090 per year. See here: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/kindergarten-and-elementary-school-teachers.htm
For High School its $55,050 per year. See here: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-school-teachers.htm
Tippler: Thanks. The BLS says that the median weekly earnings of an American with “Bachelor’s degree and higher” was about $1137 per week (source: http://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2010/college/ ). So that’s $59,124 for 12 months of work compared to $53,090 for 9 months of work (the teacher stat you cited). Then factor in the higher-than-average value of public employee benefits, such as a defined-benefit pension plan, to get the total compensation per month of work.
[This is one reason it is so easy for school systems to hire teachers. Here’s an excerpt from a 2013 blog posting:
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.
source: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2013/05/23/cambridge-public-schools-perspective-from-a-new-teacher/%5D
On your suggestion, Phil, I read “The Smartest Kids in the World.” This was a refreshing look at how they do things successfully in other countries, which seems to me a /very/ good idea. Why not learn from others? The Finland system was impressive, the South Korean example mostly kinda sad, but I enjoyed hearing about the rock star teachers who get paid a lot there.
I also read “The Smartest Kids in the World” on Phil’s recommendation. One thing that struck me was that the description of the “Common Core” curriculum in the book seemed like a very sensible and smart thing to do. It was kind of a “best practice” done in countries like Finland.
I had not known anything about Common Core up to that point apart from being told by my local newspaper, politicians, and some teachers that it was something to be avoided at all costs.
For the discussion at hand, I think there is a wide gap in pay between suburban/city teachers and rural teachers. I think most rural teachers are probably underpaid.
In the late ’80s, I was fed up with New England winters and looked into becoming a math teacher for the Miami-Dade School District. I filled out the paper work, mailed it in, and a few weeks later found myself in Miami for the first time at the Miami-Dade School District Headquarters interviewing for a full-time math teacher position. Without any teaching experience or training, they offered me the job on the spot. I turned it down, but ended up in Miami two years later still doing software development, but teacher hiring was non-stop. Teacher positions depend heavily on how fast the district’s number of school age children is growing, and it was growing very fast during the mid ’80s to mid ’90s in S. FL.
At Back-to-School Night, was surprised that a Johns Hopkins biology major, who pursued a master’s in biology there as well, was teaching my 7th grader Life Sciences. He explained that prior to teaching, he worked at Ft Detrick. He concluded that the health hazards in lab work weren’t trivial, and therefore he switched to teaching, having been a TA at Hopkins. He’s a smart guy, so I think he weighed the economic pros & cons pretty carefully. Granted, he is teaching in one of the best-paid school districts in the nation (Montgomery County, MD), esp when health-care & pension are factored.
Chuck: “most rural teachers are probably underpaid.” If so, why don’t they quit to take a job where they are paid a market wage?
Separately, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/18/oversupply-elementary-education/1917569/ talks about the imbalance between qualified teaching graduates and available jobs, e.g., “Public elementary schools in Cherry Hill, N.J., average 400 to 600 applicants for one full-time position” and “Illinois trained roughly 10 teachers for every one position available, according to an estimate by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a Washington based research and policy group.”
The economy stinks and far too many people are getting college degrees (it’s not as if they could get a decent job without one) so there is a big imbalance between the number of open positions (esp. ones that are basically jobs-for-life) and the # of candidates. Cherry Hill is a wealthy suburb that pays above average and the students there (unlike in nearby Camden) won’t assault you, so it’s especially desirable.