Why are teachers and nurses underpaid?
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Anonymous
Sorry, but that’s simply not true. If teaching really were a job that many millions could do with some standard training, it wouldn’t have such an incredibly high burnout rate in the first 5 years. The truth is, training only gets you so far. You can understand content, but you need to have a collection of personal and interpersonal skills to actually succeed in a classroom. Unfortunately, people who haven’t taught don’t grasp the emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual demands each day brings. To be a good teacher, you need to be a strong communicator, listener, and collaborator. You need to be adaptable yet organized, patient yet timely, and understanding yet demanding. You need strong presentation skills that can successfully reach a wide variety of audiences. You need to be very good with data, including how to create opportunities to gather accurate data you can subsequently track and organize. You need time management and the ability to hold your hunger and bladder. You need the ability to be at your 100% A game each day, regardless of what is happening in your personal life. You need to be ready to be around (and responsible for) many other people each day without a moment to yourself. Teaching is a 180 day sprint with no real chance to relax until the summer hits. That type of endurance can’t be taught. You have the ability or you don’t. |
Anonymous
You have all that in the private sector AND the responsibility to deliver results. XYZ are your goals. Meet them? Bonus, promotion over time. Don't meet them? Fired. If teachers worked this way, the best ones at educating kids would stay and make much more money. The worst would leave. But you prefer to work as in communist USSR, same for all, and there you have your consequences. |
Anonymous
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It’s not that teachers are underpaid other than in a few states. It’s that they are overworked.
Paying teachers more would encourage them to stay, but so would balancing out the teacher load, reducing the number of hours they are with kids in a classroom, providing more support for special needs, and providing them with the tools they need to teach. Keeping an individual teacher pay the same, but adding additional support staff and reducing the number of hours of actual instruction a teacher does from say 6 to 4 or 4.5 would have the added benefit of raising test scores in the way that just paying them more does not. In an 8 hour day, four hours of instruction, 3 hours for planning, grading, prep (including prep for SN kids), 30 min meeting, and 30 minute lunch would be reasonable and keep teachers teaching. |
Anonymous
Don’t kid yourself. The largest political force in school board elections is teachers unions. |
Anonymous
Your argument is unclear. Are you suggesting teachers don’t have the responsibility to deliver results? What the heck have I been doing with all my tracked data and pass rates all these years? “A through Z” are my goals and I have to meet them each year. When I meet them, I am not put on a performance improvement plan and I am not fired. That’s all I get for performing well. What we don’t get are your promotions and bonuses. So we have all of your work and responsibilities with none of your perks. As for “the best ones staying,” right now they are leaving because they are tired of the way they are treated. It seems you are arguing for bonuses and better salaries for good teachers. Bring it! As a good teacher, you have me on board! Now here’s my question: how will you evaluate good teachers? People within education have been struggling with that for decades. I’m sure you have a solution for them, however. |
Anonymous
This! All of this! |
Anonymous
Lots of jobs have high turnover that don't require a high degree of skill. I'm not saying teaching doesn't require skills-- clearly, you need to be skilled to be a good teacher, at least. But it is ridiculous to point to the 5 year turnover as a sign that few can do the job. |
Anonymous
This. Though, even compared to feds, teacher salaries are heavily skewed by age as opposed to the demands of the position. A fed can’t double their salary simply by doing the same job for 25 years. Long-time teachers are paid quite well, considering the requirements of the profession, the protections of a public sector job, and the retirement/health care benefits. New teachers are paid poorly. In addition to freeing up some more time each day for planning, we do need to address pay. But we don't need to pay experienced teachers more. We mostly just need to raise new teacher pay by $10-20k, with higher increases in the areas where recruiting is harder (e.g., special education). |
Anonymous
It does illustrate how many *think* they can do the job and then realize what the job actually entails. Teaching does require a very high degree of skill, but you don’t really become fully aware of that until your first week in the classroom. Until then, it’s merely theory. I spent undergrad thinking I was walking into a fantastic job of 8-3 days playing with kiddos. I had no idea. None. |
Anonymous
Being able to do a job is different from being willing to do a job. And both are different from wanting to do a job. New teachers quitting simply implies they don't want to do the job. And that will be for a variety of reasons, many of which are unrelated to pay or ability. Increasing pay by 10-20% would capture some of the people that don't particularly want to do the job, but are willing to do it. However, at that point you're really just working on the margins. And no, the unfortunate reality is that holding a teaching job does not require a high degree of skill. Being a good teacher does, but bad teachers can get by with minimal effort and skill provided they're willing and able to do just above the bare minimum. And they'll ultimately make just as much money as the highly skilled teachers. |
Anonymous
Here’s the thing: you are arguing with a GOOD teacher. I am the one with overflowing classes because parent move their teens over to me. I am a GOOD teacher because I possess the remarkable collection of skills necessary to move 140 students each year, helping them become stronger learners in tangible and intangible ways. I work absurd hours and I almost always have to put my own family second to the job. I NEVER complain in real life, but I come here (stupidly) to this anonymous board and read comments about how teachers lack skill, are bottom-barrel college graduates, and how they have it so easy. It’s all nonsense written by people who don’t have a clue how heavy the demands are on good teachers. I’ve spent the last decade watching good teachers say “forget this” and walk off to higher-paying jobs. I’m next. I’m out. It scares me because the other good teachers, the ones we all assume will be there for our own children, are also making plans to leave. All this useless bickering on DCUM illustrates that the strong teachers are justified in leaving. I have my own young kids, however, and I already see the classrooms being filled with literally anybody we can grab. Are we okay with that as a society? I guess so, reading the attacks on this thread. You admit above that being a good teacher requires a high degree of skills, but then you say society should hold us down to the level of bad, phone-it-in teachers. That is the only type we’ll have left soon. |
Anonymous
They’ve struggled with evaluations because teachers have demanded a level of objectivity and accuracy that isn’t expected or achieved in other professional sectors. Do you really think teaching is the only job where it is hard to quantifiably assess performance in a fair manner? In most professions, performance is assessed subjectively by management, looking at a variety of imperfect objective and subjective measures, with reviews and processes in place to provide some degree of consistency. Is it perfect? No, but it is better than not rewarding higher performers. |
Anonymous
Where are you getting your information? Some of your argument above is completely alien to me, and I’ve spent 20 years in this field. Do you really think you have such an easy answer to a complex issue, especially when you are viewing it from the outside? One: we deal with HUNDREDS of human variables each day. While some professions are similar, most aren’t. There are plenty of professions that can be evaluated on basic output. That’s not the case here. Our evaluations are likely FAR more subjective in nature than others. Two: teachers ARE evaluated. I get 5 observations a year, 3 of which are unscheduled pop-ins. I have a mid-year performance review and a year-end evaluation. I have mid-year and final student surveys that impact my final rating. My data is tracked for progress, which also goes into my final review. The problem is, after all this evaluation, all I get is a “highly effective” rating. That comes with no acknowledgement, no bonus, nothing. A teacher with “needs improvement” gets the same. Perhaps the problem isn’t that teachers need to be evaluated. Perhaps the problem is we don’t boot the ineffective teachers. But we can’t! Nobody is lined up to take their place. |
Anonymous
If we don’t do something to address low-performing/low-skilled teachers, then that’s all we’re going to have left regardless of what else we do. That’s the problem. Whether your goal is more respect for the profession or higher pay, addressing performance needs to be part of the solution from the start. |
Anonymous
None of this can be true. How do I know this? Because during the pandemic all we heard from teachers is that weren’t going to risk getting sick to be a babysitter. Nope, anyone can teach and if students flailed and experienced learning loss, it was because the parents weren’t doing their jobs i.e, being a teacher. In essence teachers convinced struggling parents and students that anyone can teach and being in a classroom was mere babysitting services. That is the house you built. Nurses showed up, police showed up, firefighters showed up, hell retail workers saved the day. But teachers? Nope they don’t “babysit “. Own that. |