I know that in Chicago inner-city teachers get paid about a third of what some of their suburban counterparts make. There are some teachers that do actually make scads of money because they are in a rich district that has the money to throw at them. I suspect Richardson may have a mild case of that. But there are also many many teachers who work in districts with tight budgets and don't get nearly the same pay. Supermac, if you're working 60 hour weeks, please stop. When you work for free you shoot yourself in the foot and undersell your fellow worker. It helps you get a leg up in your march to the top, but it makes you the corporate equivalent of a scab. It's even worse that you complain that others don't submit to the same exploitation you do.
Actually, the starting pay is higher in the Dallas ISD right now ($37,000 per year)..... plus the signing bonuses and a free laptop. So the inner-city teachers are getting paid more as of right now, at least in Dallas when compared to its suburbs. BUT Dallas has to make itself a more attractive district to lure teachers (or others) to come work there. Many of the suburban districts do not have that problem and sometimes end up paying less at times even though the district itself is a wealthier one. DISD has been fairly proactive recently in getting higher teacher pay, though, so it's not exactly a representative big city district. At least that's my understanding anyway as a person who is on the outside of the whole situation.
actually, my gf is a teacher and since school started recently she works from 8 a.m. until like 10 p.m. and she's always tired. bummer. how 'bout that?
Ok, so I tell you that you only have to work 1 day a year, but you get proportionally the same amount of money as someone that works 350+ days a year. Does that equate? I don't think so. When earning salaries, you can't look at per/day worked stats. Everyone still has to buy the same things, and they sure as hell don't adjust prices based on how much you work per year. That being said, I do miss contracting... get paid for the hours you work... that's just fair.
I teach in here in the Austin area, but not IN austin. My starting salary for last year, my first year of teaching, was like $31,000. You know what my raise was for this year? Basically not a damn thing. We got bumped one level up the pay scale, essentially a $100 per year "raise," or maybe 50 cents per day. Also, these first two days of school, i have been at the school, working, from 6 am to 6 pm or so. And in those "3 months off," we usually have at least a week of mid-summer inservice, and the two or three weeks prior to the start of the school year is pretty much filled with inservice and work days. I would say that last year, i worked about 50 to 60 hours each week, sometimes more. Of course, you get more efficient with experience. But you will always have to take time to contact parents, grade papers, deal with the paperwork trail...especially in elementary. And the salary doesn't even reflect how much of MY money is spent on stuff in my classroom. There isn't some money tree in the education system that pays for everything either. Of course, i sound whiney, and that isn't my point. If you want to argue that teachers are underpaid or underappreciated, that is certainly up to you. And i also agree that circumstances differ from place to place. But someone arguing that teachers get prime jobs over the summer, or that the summer for most teachers is 3 months of open space isn't too accurate. God, i can't tell you how many educators i know that work crap retail jobs not only during the summer, but also during the actual school year! That just sucks.... With that said, I love my kids. And i wouldn't want to have any other job. And that's why teachers probably won't ever get paid. Our hearts get in the way of our minds, and while everyone wants the nation's children to be educated, they sure as hell don't want it coming out of their pockets.... RANT OVER....
Just so the teachers here know... I have HUGE respect for you. You guys are seriously underpaid and underappreciated. RR
As someone who had both parents as teachers (my father is a retired Junior High social studies teacher/guidance counselor & my mother is a Junior College math professor), I'll probably be a little biased. Granted, this was twenty years ago, but my father who had been teaching for 17 years (started in '65) was finally able to buy his first house for us and it was only because of a freaking FHA loan! LOL!! So, needless to say he wasn't Daddy Warbucks, but I don't think we were poor. However, I definitely didn't have the things that some of the other kids my age got like a brand new car when they turned 16, for example. Granted things got better with my mother teaching (she has been teaching for 25 years, the first 5 at the local high school), but they both told me not to go into teaching for the money but go into it because you really love it and care for the kids. However, that was also back when you could discipline a child by corporal punishment without worrying about getting sued or if the teacher called a kid's parent to tell them they were misbehaving, the parent took the teacher's word instead of sticking up for their spoiled brat of a child. To me, saying that a teacher is a hard job is an understatement, but that is only because I lived it by watching my parents for the first 22 years of my life and I still see it with my mother, who I am closer to than anyone else in the world. BTW - I wrote a group research paper on the supply and demand for teachers for this Econ class I had last semester, and I had no problems finding info on this subject.
By the way if you are only working 40 hours a week, then the chances are that you are not going to get very far in that job. In my industry we work 50+ during down times and 80-100 hours a week during crunch. We do not get bonuses for the most part, but if the game does well royalties come back to the team. However, let me say that in 10 years in the industry I have not seen one single royalty check. Most people work more then 40 hours per, especially if you are trying to get ahead. DD
On Monday I began my 7th year of teaching. It is something I enjoy doing(I also coach 3 sports) day inand day out. I get paid a modest amount of money and a small stipend for coaching. Last year another coach and I decided we wanted to see how much our time was worth. I tallyed the total number of hours I spent at my teaching job, that includes grading papers and any other work outside the classroom. (an aside here for SCF and others. Aks your dad and find out from him if he ever had to work after school on paperwork and other stuff. I bet he did. IT is impossible to get all your work done in the classroom,without taking anything home, if you spend the amount of time required to do a good job.) We then took the total hours and divided them by my teacher salary(none of the coaching aspect of my job was involved in this part). I made $7.46 an hour teaching. That isn't bad compared to my coaching figures, I'll cover that shortly. Our district ended school on June 1st last year(yes I had to work on a saturday). I started back for coaching on July 22nd. I had a month and a half off for my vacation. Sure that is a lot of time compared to what a lot of people get but I chose to spend my vacation working for our districts technology Department at minimum wage, to supplement my income so I could afford to pay my house note. I took one week off for vacation, one day off to take my son to the Doctor and 2 days off to go to staff development because it is required by the state that I have a certain number of days per year spent on training (training days in the summer are at my own expense). While working for the district I put in 40 hour weeks. Now back to coaching I kept the same stats for coaching as I did for teaching. So that you get an idea of where the numbers come from Here is a long synopsis of what most of my coaching duties are. I get approximately $6,000 to coach(it varies from year to year because some of the stipend is based on my daily teacher rate). IN the fall I coach Jr. High football and I am in charge of scouting. I travel(note scouts never have a home game) to places all over Southeast Texas each Friday night. Last season alone I traveled from Beaumont to West Houston, San Augustine, Trinity and to Huffman four times. generally we get home betweeen 11:00 and 1:00 on Friday nights(after also getting in late from our games on Thursdays) and have to get up on Saturday mornings to be at scout meetings at 8:00. we work Saturdays til around noon. We do this for 10 weeks +any weeks we scout for the playoffs, and not counting weeks we scout scrimages which sometimes means we see 3 games in one weekend. We also work 8:00a.m. until 9:00 p.m. for 3 weeks before school starts. After football season I move to basketball. This is my relaxing season. I coach Jr. High Basketball for 10 weeks. We play in 2 weekend tournaments each year. This part of the year is not as hectic with scouting and late football practices. We practice 3-4 days a week and take off 3 days for Thanksgiving and all but the last 2 days of the Christmas holidays. For the last 2 weeks of Basketball I pull double duty with Girls Softball I am a varsity asst. I leave basketball practice at 5:30 and go to Softball. we generally practice from 3:30 until 7:00 3-4 days a week. We also practice on Saturdays unless we have a tournament. We play 3 tourneys a year and those are 2-3 day tournaments. TO give you an idea of how long they can last... Last season we played in a tourney that washeld on a Thursday and Saturdayduring our schools spring Break, so I don't get that time off. We started with 3 games on Thursday. On Saturday we had the early game at 8:30( the tournament was held in a city an hour away). We left about 5:45 so we had enough time to warmup. Because we were playing well and not losing we ended up playing until around 12 midnight. We had a 1 hour lunch break between games and a 2 hour break for dinner,as well as a 15 minute break here and there between games. I got home well after 2:00 a.m. that nite. Softball season lasts until mid to late April. After we totaled up the weeks and hours I spent coaching( It surprisingly worked out to 40.075 hours for the 40 weeks I coach). We divided that by my pay which was a little over $6000 it showed I make a whopping $3.74 an hour. I relate these things here not for sympathy. DaDakota is right I could get a job doing something else and probably make more money doing it. I relate them so you know where teachers stand. I could move to a different district and make more money but the problems I would face from putting up with delinquent behavior would not be worth the raise. I teach and coach because I enjoy it. I enjoy it because I know that each day I may make a difference in someones life. I will end with this. It is something I read by an author whose name I cannot remember. He said " When you see someone questioning the motivations of teachers and the usefulness of schools ask that person to think about this... 'Where would any of us be if it were not for teachers'". I thought that was fitting. Where would you be if all the teachers in the world said "Screw It, I am not teaching anyone else."? Where would you be if no one had taken the time to teach you? I'm willing to bet most of us would be much worse off than we are now.
I don't eat lunch so I can spend that 30 minutes on the sims . Thats all it takes to beat most of you guys anyway
I do believe teachers should be paid more. I don't care how hard it is (I'm sure it is), but I think there job is extremely important. Teachers who teach at inner-city schools don't have to pay back their student loans, or so I've heard. BTW, when I was in the Army, I think we figured we were getting paid .20 cents an hour, lol.
Part of the problem with most teachers are the Unions. Even in the districts where there are not unions most pay is based on tenure/education level (Bachelors vs Advanced degree). The unions won't let the great teachers be rewarded and the sub-par teachers be released. Also I will totally say I had some great teachers and I also had some lousy teachers. Great teachers make you think and make you look at things differently. Bad teachers teach straight fromt eh book and use the same exams year after year (and sometimes it's the exam straight fromt he book). In other professions the exceptional people make more money than the average ones, not so with teachers. Tehy can USUALLY only advance with tenure and/or additional education. THis does not fix the problem of rewarding the good ones. I am all for paying the great teachers well (again the definition of well is dependent on how much they teach, the long summers prevent them from making too much). But we should not reward the lazy teachers who don't grade homework (you know the ones who look at your homework and either give you a check or no check with no comments), don't make new exams, and basically don't do anything except babysit.
What do you expect for a Bachelor's degree? Almost every employee that is on salary gets screwed in the "hours worked divided by" equation, which is why you're on salary instead of getting paid by the hour. When I started my first job out of school I got ten days TOTAL for sick days, vacation days whatever. I worked 14-16 hour days five days a week (for a 25k base) and split shifts at a restaurant on the weekends to make just enough to cover bills. I made 42k that year in NYC, which is not a lot of money. And that was with a Master's degree.
Of course, when starting out, teachers can sometimes make more than those starting out in other professions on a head-to-head basis. I mean, starting salary in Dallas ISD right now is $37,000. The average starting salary for an accounting graduate is just over $34,000 for the year. So starting out, the teacher salary is higher than the accountant's. Of course, five years down the line, the accountant's salary is likely to be significantly higher than the five-year teacher's salary.
