Are Teachers Overpaid?

[Autumn Dusk]

Teachers in the northeast are typically paid well. Overpaid? I dunno about that. A kindergarden teacher shouldn't get 45k a year but a high school science teacher may deserve that.

[peach_cube]

Well no. Considering the amount of money needed to get your college degree, then the required post-graduate credit that most states will make you fulfill with the first 5 or 6 years, and most first year teachers are lucky to crack 35,000.

Administration and Superintendents are another matter. They are paid based on the contract they negotiate with the school board. If a Super is paid that much you need to take it up with the board, or get someone to replace the board members. Sometimes school boards will shell out alot of dough to administration in oreder to try to turn their district around.

[Autumn Dusk]

[quote]Well no. Considering the amount of money needed to get your college degree, then the required post-graduate credit that most states will make you fulfill with the first 5 or 6 years, and most first year teachers are lucky to crack 35,000.[/quote]

Except for Computer Science majors ANYONE is lucky to crack 35k out of undergraduate college.

[dairygirl4u2c]

don't forget engineering and nursing.

[Paddington]

Some are underpaid by choosing to put in a lot of hours. If they were less diligent, they would still be a warm body that keeps children in a room for 7 hours.

[djninja2005]

In the public schools yes, they are overpaid, depending on the district, but in the Catholic school system, they are not paid enough. (At least that's what some of the lay people at my school would say.)

[Lil Red]

+J.M.J.+
i'd say that it's more like the administration is overpaid more often than teachers. the local school mill-levy got defeated, i think in part, because the administration was getting waaaayyyy overpaid.

[Deb]

I don't think any teacher in K-12 is overpaid, public or parochial. Maybe in private rich people's schools they are.
Teachers are now expected to be more than teachers. They are expected to be everything many parents are not and in public schools they have so many problem students that make it so very hard to give the rest of their students proper attention. I think that if people were paid according to the importance of their work, teachers would be making what atheletes make and atheletes, minimum wage. In a perfect world.

[CatherineM]

In my mind a great teacher is never overpaid, but a poor teacher always is. When I was a kid, the women who taught me were really exceptional. Today, those same women are probably becoming doctors and lawyers and engineers. Those jobs weren't really open to ordinary women 50 years ago when my teachers were in college. I'm not saying that is a bad thing for women to be able to reach higher, I'm just saying that a consequence is that the quality of teachers has to be watered down as a result. My college roommate is a special ed teacher, a really great one. I had to have 144 hours for my BS, and she only had to have 112 for her BEd. While I was in Calculus, she was in math for educators. If you want to entice bright people into education, you have to make the pay levels equal to other professionals, or the watering down will continue.

[Apotheoun]

Catholic school teachers aren't overpaid.

[Theoketos]

Teachers are paid too much!
Teachers and their hefty salaries for only 9 months work!
What we need here is a little perspective. We should pay teachers babysitting wages.


That's right. Instead of paying these outrageous taxes, I'd give them

$3.00 an hour. And, I'm only going to pay them for 5 hours, not

planning time. That would be $15.00 a day. Each parent should

pay $15.00 a day for these teachers to baby sit their children.
Even if they have more than one child, it's still cheaper than private

daycare.


Now how many children do they teach a day - maybe 20? That's

$15.00 x 20 = 300.00 a day. But remember, they only work 180

days a year! We're not going to pay them for all the vacations:

$300.00 x 180 =$54,000. a year for 9 months
(Just a minute my calculator must need batteries.)


What will teachers say about those who have 10 years of

experience and a master's degree?
Well, maybe (just to be fair) they could get the minimum wage.
We can round that off to about $6.00 an hour, times 5 hours, times 20
children.
$6.00 x 5 x 20.

That's $600 a day times 180 days. That's only $108,000/year .


Wait a minute- hold it. ! There is something wrong here...

/I am teacher
//Have two B.A.'s and a Masters, working on a second.
///Makes less then the Poverty Line in my State.
//Ripped this off the internet.
/60 sounds reasonable due to the value of education and the amount of work, I an avg teacher, puts into the job.

[Deb]

Good humor. I have a friend who is a teacher and I could never ever put in the time that she does. She is at school an hour or two before the day starts, an hour or two after it ends and brings home tons of stuff for another hour or two at home. She must hit twelve hours a day, every day PLUS time on weekends. So, I guess if you are going to work pretty much every single day for nine months, you would need three months off. Except for that last month when you are getting ready for the next year. aghhhh.
I think teachers should be paid a starting wage of $150,000 per year with full medical. Then, let them get increases by merit. I would want that just to have to be in a room of thirty teenages six hours a day, even if I did not teach them anything!

[Lisieux Flower]

Teachers are definitely not overpaid. Few people realize how much money teachers actually put into their classrooms. I'm sure it depends on the district, but just from the teachers and classrooms I've shadowed and helped out in, the teachers aren't given the funding for a lot of things. Like most art supply materials, books for the classroom, decorations and charts around the classroom... plus the countless hours teachers put in after school creating lesson plans, before school setting up, on weekends grading papers... teachers [i]definitely[/i] need to be paid more.

[Winchester]

[quote name='Altari' post='1537166' date='May 22 2008, 10:31 AM']I got into this debate with a "former teacher".

I live in Northern Illinois. Teachers are LUDICROUSLY overpaid around here. My public school English teacher from senior year (who was one of the worst teachers I ever had) is paid more than $60,000. The local school district "administrator" is paid a whopping $170K per year (more than our governor). One Superintendent in our state is paid nearly [b]$360,000[/b] per year (as much as our governor and the mayor of Chicago combined).[/quote]
You know how much work it takes to be a good teacher?

60K goes really quick. I'd love to see you supporting a family, paying off your education loans and all the incidentals life throws at you. Yeah, you can get by with less. When you factor in the pension contributions, medical, dental, union dues (your teachers are probably union, not certainly) taxes and such, 60K ain't a huge amount.

I'm in my tenth year at my job, also government and I'm pulling in around 1400 a pay period, 2800 a month, plus my overtime. Not doing bad, but not getting filthy rich. I encounter teachers all the time. The money they get paid ain't enough to put up with snot nosed brats who want them to work for less. You'd probably like to cut my pay too, right? It ain't teachers salaries that are eating that 80%. Do the math, you went to school. You think the teachers have 6 students in their classrooms? I'll agree with you about the superintendants--they're overpaid like most management types.

You people not working government are always so quick to beesh about our salaries. We educate you, keep your roads repaired, get shot, burned, crushed by buildings you underbuild to turn a quick buck. We live and die for you people. We also pay taxes. I pay a month's salary in property taxes every year.

How much less do you think they should get paid? Should they drop to 50K? 40? 30?

I hope you put in some time in the real world at a blue collar job.

[BG45]

Let's see, mom's a teacher here with a Masters, more than two decades of experience, and 60+ hours of continuing education and she might clear 45-50k if she's lucky (before pensions, state taxes, local taxes, federal taxes, insurances, etc. that are withdrawn per pay period). Most of our teachers leave the state after getting their degrees because all the bordering states pay more. Most of what remains is sadly...less than desirable.

Plus a lot of times teachers have to finance their own classrooms because what the school district will pay for is far from enough. Plus all that continuing education? A good deal of it the teacher might have to pay for if funds aren't enough. It's not unusual for my mother, for example, to pay hundreds a year for certain supplies...and we'll not even get into how taxes wreck that kind of salary, Winchester's done a good job of it.

There is no overtime for time put in past the end of the school day, such as grading papers, writing lesson plans, cleaning the room for meetings, the meetings, parent-teacher conferences. There is no extra "hazard" pay for when an unruly child strikes a teacher and a teacher can not defend him or herself; and trust me this happens [b]a lot[/b].

Special education departments are often underfunded, and thus some disruptive students with special needs are left in the classroom and require more attention than the rest of the classroom. Sometimes unruly students (not necessarily special ed) pose a true danger to the teacher and to the fellow students...there is no extra pay for dealing with such.

A teacher, at least in primary education, must bend over backward to accommodate any parent that has a demand, or risk a lawsuit. Then half the times, the parents will not show up for a meeting they have insisted upon that has taken the teacher from the classroom. A teacher must also put up with the individual beliefs of students. For a real life example, a Jehovah's Witness student may not be able to celebrate certain holidays, and other work must be provided for him or her so that he or she does not receive a "free grade" or a zero on the work that was not done.


If I want to react badly to personal experiences, I can certainly think of some teachers who are overpaid here, despite the lack of decent wages. The teachers who just sit there while kids run amok (or in the case of my Freshman high school year, a teacher that believed us when we told her a mannequin head was a fuzzy rock), the teachers like my fifth grade math teacher who didn't teach (who now teaches Learning Disability spelling with 40+ vocabulary words a week), and wonderful high school math teachers I had who didn't know how to do the math they were teaching.

Edited May 27, 2008 by BG45