[dan-robertson]

How much approximately do you think a teacher gets paid? Obviously it depends on specifics so maybe say whether you’re imagining a city centre / suburban / rural school, and whether the state/district is wealthy and whether it’s a high school or whatever.

I have some guesses in my head for something like ‘high school teacher in moderately wealthy Chicago suburb’ (I haven’t written the number here because I don’t want to anchor you) though I don’t have a great sense for how many jobs like that there are in the US. Above base pay there can also be more for helping with extracurriculars, potentially a defined benefit pension, and after settling in teachers will have a lot of free time/vacation not spent planning lessons. The amount of pay may not excite you if you’re a professional software developer at a well-paying company in the US, but I’m not sure that a more typical professional job would be “much better-paid”.

[germinalphrase]

I taught in a moderately wealthy suburb of Minneapolis. With ten years of experience, my comp was about 50k. While I have heard stories of teachers from prior generations receiving somewhat lavish defined benefit pensions, I don’t believe that has been an option for new teachers in decades. With regard to vacations, we had the school calendar vacations (which is fine), but otherwise I accrued about 8 days of PTO per year without any other sort of vacation/parent leave/etc. When our first child was born, I burned all three weeks of accrued PTO and was back on the job. By comparison, when I left teaching - I doubled my income, work about 20 percent fewer hours a week, have comparable healthcare, unlimited PTO, took 8 weeks paid parental leave with our second child, and have much less day-to-day stress. Teaching isn’t a salt mine, but - in my experience - it wasn’t a cushy job either.

[reducesuffering]

For another anecdote, someone I know teaching private with 0 years experience in the Bay Area / Silicon Valley makes $80k.

[notmyuserlogin]

Public school in WA state, Masters degree, first year I'm making about $75k.

The trick is that it will take me 16 years to get to the top of the pay scale and make what I made as a software developer last year ($115K). When the union asks what I want, that is what I tell them. Top pay is fine, but it takes too long to get there.

I like the job a lot more and its only about three times as much work.

[germinalphrase]

There are huge regional differences.

[tptacek]

Oak Park, IL is wealthy but not like Kennilworth wealthy, or Lincoln Park wealthy. OPRF, our public high school, has zero teachers making less than six figures.

Lane III (bachelor's degree) CPS teacher entry comp --- year 1 --- is over $80k/yr, including benefits (a defined-benefit pension) and 10 weeks vacation.

[germinalphrase]

The equivalent starting pay in my former district would by 37k/yr. I have relative living the Chicago suburbs that teaches. The difference in comp between her and I supports the numbers you have provided. I have also heard anecdotes about teachers that retired about 10 years ago and are provided 110+/yr on their pensions; however, the Illinois pension system seems to have crossed into "too big to fail" territory.

[tptacek]

My mental model for this is that teacher comp in large urban and suburban school districts is quite good, and that comp in rural school districts is quite bad, and everything else is a crap shoot.

[Corrado]

Almost my entire family are educators (wife, children, etc.) and we all agree that teacher pay is very low. Specifically, when you break it down at an hourly rate the pay is comically low. I think my wife calculated her pay several years ago at something like $2.00 / hour.

Interestingly, during the height of the pandemic everyone seemed to come around to the fact that teachers didn't get paid enough for the amount of work that they do. This was because parents and caregivers got first hand experience in what teachers go through on a day-to-day basis. However, that sentiment has faded with time and with it the value of a good teacher.

[ang_cire]

That rhetoric about teacher (and medical worker) pay during the pandemic was, whether people realize it or not, nothing but a cynical attempt to encourage teachers not to quit, in order to save the parents' jobs.

A lot of teachers (my wife being one as well) truly thought that people had been woken up to the incredible crisis in our education system, but 2-3 years later, we know better; they just wanted teachers to stay on long enough for their life situations to stabilize, so they could go back to ignoring them.