Why are teachers and nurses underpaid?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They are NOT underpaid. Supply and demand

The "supply and demand" argument against teachers isn't going to work for much longer. Teachers willing to teach are in short supply nationwide. There are plenty of people with teaching credentials who are now making more money in other professions. The question then becomes what can we do to attract them back to teaching.

Better would be to tap talent of people with real skills and experience who are good at teaching and managing. Get a program going to entice them to teach. Or educated retired moms.

Private schools can get great talent interested in teaching. Sometimes they call older alums in the area- sick of doing IP law, come be a sub, come be a full time maths teacher.

Great hires.

People “with real skills and experience” want a salary commensurate with that. That’s how the market works.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The teachers and nurses I know are not underpaid at all. The local teachers complaining about their salaries take vacations in Hawaii, France, GB and /or own horses while the nurses do their job without complaining.

This is absurd. Tell me how I can regularly vacation overseas (or own a horse) when I am only getting paid $80K after 15 years teaching. I have a family to support on that, too.

As for complaining, is it fair that I complain I’m on hour 4 of working today, on Labor Day? Only about 1/3 done for the day, too.

I had no idea schools were open Today, where?

That’s the point. They aren’t open today. Teachers work on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays… whatever it takes to get the job done. They work from home all the time. That’s one of the reasons teachers are leaving: the hours!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:They are NOT underpaid. Supply and demand

The "supply and demand" argument against teachers isn't going to work for much longer. Teachers willing to teach are in short supply nationwide. There are plenty of people with teaching credentials who are now making more money in other professions. The question then becomes what can we do to attract them back to teaching.

Better would be to tap talent of people with real skills and experience who are good at teaching and managing. Get a program going to entice them to teach. Or educated retired moms.

Private schools can get great talent interested in teaching. Sometimes they call older alums in the area- sick of doing IP law, come be a sub, come be a full time maths teacher.

Great hires.

People “with real skills and experience” want a salary commensurate with that. That’s how the market works.

Yes, that’s how the market works. That’s also exactly why we have a teacher shortage. If we as a society decide to value teachers more, and maybe consider them people “with real skills and experience,” we’ll have more teachers. As it stands, the shortage will continue to grow.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think they are underpaid. Yes I think they work hard and deserve our respect but what the earn is ovoid considering the amount of days off they get over the course of a year ( teachers) compared to other jobs. I am not s nurse but do shift work similar to a nurse schedule, they’re not working every day either and depending on where they work and seniority can get cushy schedules too.

I want some of what you are having. There are areas where teachers do not even make $30k starting out.

In a lot of those same areas, lawyers with law degrees from so so schools may be lucky to make $40k starting out, and they probably have more student loans and a tougher time keeping their jobs.

You’re jealous because you hear stories of kids who survived years of hell and became radiologists or big-law law firm associates.

But those high-income young workers are super lucky lottery winners. They’re the Squid Game survivors standing on a pyramid of 50 or more students who got winnowed out (failed premeds) or who have seedy, low-paid jobs (most young lawyers).

What, precisely, am I jealous of?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is it because both occupations are mainly performed by women, and women are not valued as highly as men?

This, but also there seems to be an endless supply of new graduates with starry eyes willing to work for peanuts and deal with exploitation and abuse in the workplace.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The teachers and nurses I know are not underpaid at all. The local teachers complaining about their salaries take vacations in Hawaii, France, GB and /or own horses while the nurses do their job without complaining.

This is absurd. Tell me how I can regularly vacation overseas (or own a horse) when I am only getting paid $80K after 15 years teaching. I have a family to support on that, too.

As for complaining, is it fair that I complain I’m on hour 4 of working today, on Labor Day? Only about 1/3 done for the day, too.

I had no idea schools were open Today, where?

That’s the point. They aren’t open today. Teachers work on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays… whatever it takes to get the job done. They work from home all the time. That’s one of the reasons teachers are leaving: the hours!

I know a lot of teachers who thought the pandemic would show the public how much work goes into helping young people learn. Initially, it did. And then, parents got angry that they had to assist their own kids and parents’ employers were made that their workers were distracted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is it because both occupations are mainly performed by women, and women are not valued as highly as men?

On a regular risk-adjusted, selection-adjusted, cost-adjusted basis, teachers are often very well-paid.

Most people who can handle college and want to be teachers can at least start out being teachers, without going through a tough weedout process. That’s probably the equivalent of a weedout adjustment of about 200 percent. (Kids who start college aiming to be teachers are at least two times as likely to achieve their goals as premeds, pre-engineers or big-law pre-laws are.)

Teachers can typically get hired with a one-year master’s. That means they get a $2,000 to $5,000 per year income bump over a 40-year career, and maybe a $4,000 to $15,000 per year bump, if you include interest costs and the value of two extra years of ability to work full time.

K-12 teachers can go through layoffs, but they’re less likely to go through a layoff than engineers, and they don’t face the weedout process law firm associates face.

Also, big-law lawyers get big salaries, but most law school grads are lucky to make $60,000 starting out. Engineers earn high starting salaries but tend to have short careers.

So, certainly, some lawyers do very well, but many lawyers are like Saul in Better Call Saul on a bad day. They’re seriously screwed. They are much more poor than a teacher with a master’s degree and 20 years of tenure.

I think any given teacher who’s making $70,000 after 20 years is the economic equivalent of a lawyer with 20 years of experience who’s making $150,000. And, in my area, teachers with 20 years of experience and master’s degrees make $100,000 or more.

Nurses face a tougher weeding out process than teachers and, in many cases, more education bills, but they earn about as much as small-law lawyers, and they’re probably about five times less likely to face weeding out than premeds. And they face much less marketing and practice management stress than doctors, along with drastically lower education and insurance costs and loss-of-work-year losses.

So, sure, nurses earn less than doctors, but a group of 100 college freshman premeds and a group of 100 college freshman pre-nursing students will probably end up with comparable lifetime cohort earnings in the targeted profession, once you add in adjustments for weeding out risk, education costs, student loan interest, malpractice insurance costs, etc.

In other words: a neurologist might be doing great, but, if you average her after-education income with the income of five of her premed friends who failed to become doctors, that average income is probably comparable to the weedout-adjusted income of a nurse or K-12 teacher.

The weed out process happens for teachers once they actually start teaching. I read that something like half of all teachers quit in the first five years of teaching. If other professions had that dropout rate, some investigating would be done. Not in teaching. They just pull in warm bodies to replace them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers in FFX County start around $53K. That seems like a fine starting wage for a college grad. Even better considering time off in the summer.

Teachers get the summer off. They work less days a year than other professions. I get 26 days of leave a year pkus holidays. A teacher gets triple.

^^^^fewer

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I remember zoom school. The 2nd teacher, aged 27, had tons of misspellings and math errors whilst teaching. I viewed them as a slacker who just wanted a sleeper job. Not like kids are going to do anything, or the school. Schools keep poorly performing teachers all the time.

They ended up quitting to live abroad doing peace corp or something similar. Left in the middle of the school year as well. Very professional.

Sounds like a public school grad. My kids have awful spelling and MCPS didn't care. I finally started teaching them myself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers in FFX County start around $53K. That seems like a fine starting wage for a college grad. Even better considering time off in the summer.

Teachers get the summer off. They work less days a year than other professions. I get 26 days of leave a year pkus holidays. A teacher gets triple.

Your leave is paid though. For 2 months the teachers are not paid. Now, they are free to get a second job during that time to make money.

I don't think teachers are paid enough for what we expect of them though. I taught college before and that was tough enough, with just a couple hours a day and kids that wanted to be there. I can't imagine taking on a classroom of students for 6 hours every day.

The unpaid leave argument is truly one of the stupidest things I've ever heard and it doesn't make you look very smart. Whether you call your salary an annual salary or salary for the 10 months you work it's really just semantics. Everyone knows summers are time off and whether you actually get paid during it or just need to set aside some of your other paychecks doesn't change anything. The unpaid argument would only make sense if teachers were given an annualized salary that was then pro rated for the time they actually worked but it doesn't work like that.

The compensation structure is so different in a teaching job versus a corporate type job that you can’t really compare. I guess if you calculate the salary earned per day of work, that would give a more clear comparison.

I still don't see how it matters. If you get paid $80K over 12 months or over 10 months you're still getting $80K as your salary.

This is a teacher argument that literally no people in any other profession understands because it’s such an odd way of thinking about pay. The fact that a pay check doesn’t come in the summer has nothing to do with yearly salary, but teachers always insist somehow it’s much harder to be paid this way and it seems really simple to just put some if you’re salary away every pay check to cover the summer. Many professions do it. Like, people who work in commission based jobs are the opposite. They’ll give you a yearly salary based on what they made last year, even if the year prior they made much more or much less.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers in FFX County start around $53K. That seems like a fine starting wage for a college grad. Even better considering time off in the summer.

It is excellent, actually.

I'm in my 15th year of teaching and my DS just graduated from college. He was offered my exact salary for his first job.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is it because both occupations are mainly performed by women, and women are not valued as highly as men?

This, but also there seems to be an endless supply of new graduates with starry eyes willing to work for peanuts and deal with exploitation and abuse in the workplace.

MD colleges are graduating 33% fewer education majors than they used to. I bet it will be 50% in the next few years. That's why districts are trying to find people through alternative programs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers in FFX County start around $53K. That seems like a fine starting wage for a college grad. Even better considering time off in the summer.

Teachers get the summer off. They work less days a year than other professions. I get 26 days of leave a year pkus holidays. A teacher gets triple.

Your leave is paid though. For 2 months the teachers are not paid. Now, they are free to get a second job during that time to make money.

I don't think teachers are paid enough for what we expect of them though. I taught college before and that was tough enough, with just a couple hours a day and kids that wanted to be there. I can't imagine taking on a classroom of students for 6 hours every day.

The unpaid leave argument is truly one of the stupidest things I've ever heard and it doesn't make you look very smart. Whether you call your salary an annual salary or salary for the 10 months you work it's really just semantics. Everyone knows summers are time off and whether you actually get paid during it or just need to set aside some of your other paychecks doesn't change anything. The unpaid argument would only make sense if teachers were given an annualized salary that was then pro rated for the time they actually worked but it doesn't work like that.

The compensation structure is so different in a teaching job versus a corporate type job that you can’t really compare. I guess if you calculate the salary earned per day of work, that would give a more clear comparison.

I still don't see how it matters. If you get paid $80K over 12 months or over 10 months you're still getting $80K as your salary.

This is a teacher argument that literally no people in any other profession understands because it’s such an odd way of thinking about pay. The fact that a pay check doesn’t come in the summer has nothing to do with yearly salary, but teachers always insist somehow it’s much harder to be paid this way and it seems really simple to just put some if you’re salary away every pay check to cover the summer. Many professions do it. Like, people who work in commission based jobs are the opposite. They’ll give you a yearly salary based on what they made last year, even if the year prior they made much more or much less.

Teachers love when non-teachers tell us how we should think about our jobs.

You say many professions are paid like teachers. Can you point to several?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers in FFX County start around $53K. That seems like a fine starting wage for a college grad. Even better considering time off in the summer.

Teachers get the summer off. They work less days a year than other professions. I get 26 days of leave a year pkus holidays. A teacher gets triple.

Your leave is paid though. For 2 months the teachers are not paid. Now, they are free to get a second job during that time to make money.

I don't think teachers are paid enough for what we expect of them though. I taught college before and that was tough enough, with just a couple hours a day and kids that wanted to be there. I can't imagine taking on a classroom of students for 6 hours every day.

The unpaid leave argument is truly one of the stupidest things I've ever heard and it doesn't make you look very smart. Whether you call your salary an annual salary or salary for the 10 months you work it's really just semantics. Everyone knows summers are time off and whether you actually get paid during it or just need to set aside some of your other paychecks doesn't change anything. The unpaid argument would only make sense if teachers were given an annualized salary that was then pro rated for the time they actually worked but it doesn't work like that.

The compensation structure is so different in a teaching job versus a corporate type job that you can’t really compare. I guess if you calculate the salary earned per day of work, that would give a more clear comparison.

I still don't see how it matters. If you get paid $80K over 12 months or over 10 months you're still getting $80K as your salary.

This is a teacher argument that literally no people in any other profession understands because it’s such an odd way of thinking about pay. The fact that a pay check doesn’t come in the summer has nothing to do with yearly salary, but teachers always insist somehow it’s much harder to be paid this way and it seems really simple to just put some if you’re salary away every pay check to cover the summer. Many professions do it. Like, people who work in commission based jobs are the opposite. They’ll give you a yearly salary based on what they made last year, even if the year prior they made much more or much less.

Teachers love when non-teachers tell us how we should think about our jobs.

You say many professions are paid like teachers. Can you point to several?

And non-teachers love when teachers tell them how they should think about their pay. Which is the assertion made when you insist no one gets it.

Literally all seasonal jobs are paid this way. You get paid when you work and not paid when you don’t work. Your job is seasonal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Teachers in FFX County start around $53K. That seems like a fine starting wage for a college grad. Even better considering time off in the summer.

Teachers get the summer off. They work less days a year than other professions. I get 26 days of leave a year pkus holidays. A teacher gets triple.

Your leave is paid though. For 2 months the teachers are not paid. Now, they are free to get a second job during that time to make money.

I don't think teachers are paid enough for what we expect of them though. I taught college before and that was tough enough, with just a couple hours a day and kids that wanted to be there. I can't imagine taking on a classroom of students for 6 hours every day.

The unpaid leave argument is truly one of the stupidest things I've ever heard and it doesn't make you look very smart. Whether you call your salary an annual salary or salary for the 10 months you work it's really just semantics. Everyone knows summers are time off and whether you actually get paid during it or just need to set aside some of your other paychecks doesn't change anything. The unpaid argument would only make sense if teachers were given an annualized salary that was then pro rated for the time they actually worked but it doesn't work like that.

The compensation structure is so different in a teaching job versus a corporate type job that you can’t really compare. I guess if you calculate the salary earned per day of work, that would give a more clear comparison.

I still don't see how it matters. If you get paid $80K over 12 months or over 10 months you're still getting $80K as your salary.

This is a teacher argument that literally no people in any other profession understands because it’s such an odd way of thinking about pay. The fact that a pay check doesn’t come in the summer has nothing to do with yearly salary, but teachers always insist somehow it’s much harder to be paid this way and it seems really simple to just put some if you’re salary away every pay check to cover the summer. Many professions do it. Like, people who work in commission based jobs are the opposite. They’ll give you a yearly salary based on what they made last year, even if the year prior they made much more or much less.

Teachers love when non-teachers tell us how we should think about our jobs.

You say many professions are paid like teachers. Can you point to several?

And non-teachers love when teachers tell them how they should think about their pay. Which is the assertion made when you insist no one gets it.

Literally all seasonal jobs are paid this way. You get paid when you work and not paid when you don’t work. Your job is seasonal.

Er… it’s *my* job. I get to decide how to feel about it.

Also:
Seasonal work: “A seasonal industry is activity within an economic sector in which the majority of operations take place during only part of the year, usually within a period of half a year or less. In some cases, as with agriculture, this limitation may relate to climate or other forces of nature.” That definition doesn’t apply to teaching. Twenty years in the profession and you are literally the first person to try calling it seasonal work.