Republican answer: too much!
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My exact first thought. Statistics are only useful if they are actually meaningful, otherwise you can just throw stuff around at random to make any point you want.
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Pretty sure you are NOT living in Austin.
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Why are they talking about averages instead of means and/or medians? “Average” is meaningless.
I had to dig around to find out what they meant by average, and it appears they they’re using means. Which raises the second question: why aren’t they using medians? They’re a better measure for this sort of thing.
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Average or mean is probably fine. The distribution is going to be very modal.
The distribution is going to be very modal.
Argh, you mean you can’t do anything until you click ‘ok’ or ‘cancel’ ?
Looks like every state is within one “quadrant” (however they decided upon those) between cost of living and teacher pay, except Hawaii and New Hampshire are two steps lower on pay, and Michigan is two steps higher.
…which is why I am sceptical of these figures. Because of this:
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I was wondering about that too. Maybe there is a lot of in-state variance between rural and urban teacher salaries?
The six jobs thing though, seems a little contrived:
Moy teaches high school algebra, drives a school bus in the afternoon, coaches football and wrestling, umpires Little League baseball and drives for rideshare services.
That’s one* job broken into 4 parts, a hobby, then a second pseudo-job.
*: Maybe one and a half, with the bus driving.
That was my first hit on Google; you can find plenty of similar stories.
I understand that other major issues are (a) teachers paying thousands from their own pockets for school supplies, and (b) teacher’s healthcare costs increasing astronomically while wages stay still.
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Not a teacher, but, this.
I make what on the surface looks like a good salary. However, short of a lottery win, I can kiss goodbye to owning my own place, ever. Not even a one bedroom condo. Retirement is going to be a bitch. I will probably die before I can retire, and that’s with a pension. If I lived somewhere else in the country (with a couple of exceptions), I could damn near have a detached home paid off by now.
Salaries have not kept pace with the cost of living. Especially in areas where more people live (and there might, therefore, be employment for teachers).
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Oh hell I didn’t get a raise for like 5 years at my former employment. The only thing that kept me around was finding it hard to punt on 4 weeks of vacation time and that my first and second level managers didn’t get raises either. Now while I am employed again after 2 years of looking I am making 13K less a year.
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In addition to the local cost of living, any statistics re teacher salaries should also take into account that teacher workloads are ridiculous. It’s common for elementary teachers, especially non-academic teachers, to have zero or very few paid non-contact minutes (“prep time”). But there is obviously so much more to the job than what happens when you’re facing a group of students. So I choose to work part-time. That means that my actual position is three days per week – 18 classroom contact hours distributed over four days – plus a day and a half of necessary unpaid prep (lesson planning, curriculum development, colleague and parent communication, plus too many other tasks to even begin to list here, all of which are absolutely required and expected). That gives me roughly the same workload as someone who works full time at a job where they don’t have to take their work home with them every day.
Someone else can get into the subject of emotional labor, and how one never really stops thinking about students, their challenges, the day’s conflicts, and the as-yet-unfinished work (so, ALL of the work). Also someone else could mention the culture of utter disrespect - when a child misbehaves or fails to work, it’s always your fault.
For the record, the full-time salaried teachers at my school (private, independent elementary school in a very affluent New England town) make just under $50k/YR. The hourly employees (lunch/recess help and substitutes) make $12/hr. As a special-subject teacher working (nominally) three days per week, my before tax annual is $33k.
[Edited, $50k per year, not per hour, have to be somewhere, apologize for rushing through]
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I’m starting to get the picture here. The first step (and it’s already been said here before) might be to determine how the figures were determined (keeping in mind that the numbers presented via @pesco apply to only elementary school teachers).
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Indeed
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